


Words, and why you hate them

by yesfir



Series: Words [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Awkward Romance, Gender Dysphoria, Humor, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Just being careful, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Not everyone, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Damara Megido/Caliborn, Past Jake English/Jane Crocker - Freeform, Pregnancy, Romance, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Species Swap, THE LAST TWO TAGS ARE NOT RELATED, Trans Dirk Strider, Trans Jade Harley, Trolls on Earth (Homestuck), Urban Fantasy, all of these are past references, and jake being a mess, and will not be described in detail in the fic, bc what would we be without it, because dirk and jake, but there will be some dirk brooding, errr, just some characters, listen it's mostly just a soulmate fic, oh right, um as for warnings, with extra world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:29:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28778307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yesfir/pseuds/yesfir
Summary: On a world which is sort of like our own, sort of not, trolls and humans live side by side and everything is is a little bit more anachronistic, a little bit strange; full of steam engines, gentry, and mysticism. And if you happen to belong to the lucky 30-35% of the population who have a soulmate, their words will appear on your skin if they fulfil two conditions: They must convey a fundamental truth about said soulmate, and they must be clearly communicated to another person in their presence.Maybe Dirk wouldn't be so angry if he'd always been as uninterested as he claims. But the truth is he'd been desperate to have a soulmate, and coming to terms with his persistently unmarked skin had been hard. So when it finally turns up, way later than it ought to, and it can more or less be summed up as "I'm a lying liar who lies"? Oh, he'smad.Jake has always been a complicated relationship with the truth, even before he made an increasingly convoluted mess of his personal life - and more than anything, he's determined not to let his soulmate find him.
Relationships: Dave Strider & Dirk Strider, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Jake English & Jade Harley, Jake English/Dirk Strider, Jane Crocker & Dirk Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket
Series: Words [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080224
Comments: 12
Kudos: 46
Collections: DirkJake Big Bang 2k21





	1. Liar

**Author's Note:**

> HERE WE ARE, my second part of the dirkjake week big bang! again, all my sincerest thanks to everyone in the discord for help with betaing, brainstorming, sprinting, yelling into the void, and other such artistic endeavors.
> 
> extra thanks to dis who made the gorgeous art accompanying this fic, if you haven't seen it yet you can go marvel at his skills [HERE](https://twitter.com/Distealart/status/1348650133697699841)!
> 
> this is also the companion piece to "words, and why you love them", and the two fics will run loosely parallel to each other, though you won't have to read one to understand what's happening in the other. this one will simply focus on dirkjake and the other on davekat ~~and at some point in the future there might just be a vrisresi one too~~. i will be focusing on completing this one first, and then go back and update that one again.
> 
> on a note concerning the chapter, Equius is species swapped, so he's human.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which words are condemned in no uncertain terms; fate is questioned; there are two (2) instances of shirtlessness – albeit not of particularly alluring kind; a marriage autopsy takes place; a dress is ruined.

_ Dirk _

Your name is Dirk Strider, and you hate words.

Okay, you know most people would be surprised to hear you say as much, might even see it as a downright invitation to take the piss, and you know what, they’d have a right to. You’re not as bad as Dave, you don’t actually talk to the walls if no other option is available, but you’re not exactly a shrinking violet either. People might go so far as to say you’re fond of the sound of your own voice, and while you’d naturally contest such a claim on a number of different points, you have to admit that you’d probably be hard pressed to do so in under 1500 words. That is, if these particular and entirely hypothetical people actually cared about your reasoning, and didn’t just exist as straw-stuffed stand-ins for a mob of hecklers who would remain entirely unconvinced when you say that _you fucking hate words_.

It’s not just the more obvious and general reasons either – or what you assume to be a more obvious and general experience, though admittedly you haven’t discussed the topic at length with anyone. It’s a deeply personal matter, so it’s not something you’d be comfortable sharing with people you aren’t close with, and to be brutally honest that reduces the list of potential candidates to exactly one person: Your twin. Dave. Dave, who loves words more than just about anything that isn’t you, who can talk about them for hours and lights up every time he learns a new one, who is literally going to university so he can study the very concept of words. You just can’t do it. It would be like kicking an excited puppy in the face. And while you might be a bit of a bastard, you think you haven’t quite crossed over into outright puppy-kicking just yet.

But yeah, sure, there’s your more pedestrian reasons for hating words. Like how no matter how carefully you weigh them and turn them over in your head before speaking them or committing them to writing, they never quite come out the way you want them. Somehow once they’re out there in the world, they always turn out a bit too awkward, too blunt, too needy... or just too fucking mean. They never seem to accomplish what you want them to, and sometimes they in fact manage the exact fucking opposite, and damn it, no matter how obvious your mistake might be in retrospect it doesn’t matter, because the damage is already done.

Words can do an unaccountable amount of damage, and you don’t like that.

Also there’s the whole thing with words and… well, gender. The less said about that, the better, but let’s just state for the record that the whole thing with pronouns and gendering of random shit does not endear words to you in the slightest. Dave says that in the really ancient troll language there weren’t any personal pronouns at all, just tones indicating who you were talking about. These could indicate blood caste, relative social status, quadrant alignment and, yes, gender, but only in such cases where it had previously been clearly established between the speakers. Which… well, good for them, except not even trolls speak that language anymore apart from religious nuts of various kinds, so it’s kind of a moot point.

Your main reason for hating words, the part where it gets _personal_ , is the damn soulmate mark thing. First of all, you hate that something so central to your character – i.e. the hatred of words – is based on a goddamn _cliché_. No offense to all the swooning lovers out there, but you really don’t want to be defined by whoever the loosely delineated and rarely questioned forces of Fate have decided to shackle you to. The fact that you’re somehow expected to be grateful for the indignity is just icing on the shit cake, as if there’s truly something enviable about being inescapably dragged forward by a force you cannot control or deny, and which puts its mark on your skin so that it’s impossible even to ignore it for long. How are you supposed to not get all twisted up about something like that, to the point where a person you don’t know, a person you’ve probably never even met yet, has the power to shape who you are?

You’d really thought that you were going to escape it. Well, no, that’s not how you used to think. Loath as you are to admit it, you’d been jealous when you’d seen those pale gray words start to slowly bloom across various parts of Dave’s body, even though the unfamiliar letters were incomprehensible to you both. It’s easier to acknowledge that you’d been pissed right the fuck off to find out that your twin brother wasn’t solely yours anymore, and honestly that’s saying something, because you’re well aware that being viciously possessive is among the more unpleasant facets of your character. But no, that’s not the whole truth. Since this is your own very private story, and the narrative is unlikely to spare you from indignities for long, you might as well admit it. At the time – the time, in your defense, being when you were a kid – you had been desperate to have a soulmate too.

It was already becoming clear to you that there was, objectively speaking, very little about you that could be considered appealing, and that being smart and ambitious didn’t in fact make up for just being a generally dismal person to be around. So from a child’s uncritical perspective, sure, it had seemed reasonable to want there to be at least one person out there who wouldn’t have a choice in the matter. Especially when all the stories and ‘research’ on the subject of soulmates seemed to suggest that this person would be someone who in some way – magically and impossibly – was _made_ specifically to like all the parts of you that you loathed, the parts that only Dave could otherwise tolerate, and that was probably only because you kept them carefully hidden whenever you could.

At the time it hadn’t even crossed your mind to wonder exactly what kind of person they’d have to be to actually like you. Of course not. That came later.

So there you were. Years had passed since Dave had received his first mark, and there didn’t seem to be any way to stop them. Your brother kept receiving new ones on and off, while your own body remained an empty slate, and with every passing day it was becoming more likely that it would just never happen for you. Most people would get their first in between the ages of six and sixteen, that being loosely considered the span of life when most sentient creatures started becoming aware of themselves as distinct and unique entities. Because those were the rules: Your soulmate’s words would only turn up on your skin if they somehow constituted to an absolute truth about the person you were destined for; and nothing so simple as a name or a phone number either, no, it had to be something that actually reflected their character or life experiences in a meaningful way.

Of course it was _possible_ for them to pop up later, in the cases where one soulmate was much younger than the other, but that was honestly incredibly rare among humans; less so among trolls, what with their wildly varying life spans. Either way, the condescending advice was generally to stop hoping for a soulmate once you passed sixteen, and to come to terms with being part of the approximately 65-70% of the population that simply did not have one. Nothing wrong with that, that’s what people always said. Usually they said it a little too cheerfully, as if they were trying to compensate either for their pity or their own personal sense of loss. It was of course fully possible to find love without a soulmate, and you were assured that this love wouldn’t be any less powerful or unique. It felt like the verbal equivalent of being given a sticker or a lollipop for _not_ winning a competition, and it made you seethe quietly every time someone gave you that particular speech.

(Whenever they did, they would also unfailingly refer to you as ‘young lady’, ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’, and you would stop yourself from committing gruesome murder only by reminding yourself that you couldn’t look after Dave if you were in prison. Anyway, the epithets were repulsive, but you still preferred them to your idiotic legal name.)

You’d told yourself that you’d already given up on a soulmate long before you turned seventeen. You’d told yourself that the date in itself meant nothing, it wasn’t as if someone flicked a switch at the strike of twelve and branded you a bachelor forever – especially since you weren’t entirely sure if yours and Dave’s birthday was even the real date of your birth, what with the whole orphan situation. You told yourself that fuck it, you didn’t care anyway. Boys were nice to look at, sure, and you didn’t mind their company, but you didn’t need them to stick around for longer than one night. Definitely didn’t need one metaphorically superglued to your actual soul.

You’d told yourself all these things extremely firmly, and it still felt like absolute shit. You’d refused to look at your own naked body with heightened zeal, not wanting to see all those square inches of skin left uniformly brown, unmarked and unremarkable. You’d made a number of extremely crass jokes about your general availability, and had ignored the way Dave looked at you and said nothing, which was really unusual for him. It meant that he saw right through your feigned irreverence, and that he was kind enough not to call you on it.

You didn’t know what stung worse, his insight or his kindness.

That should’ve been that. From that day on, you tried to think of it as little as possible, and Dave knew better than to raise the subject, meaning that slowly but surely you could allow the whole stupid nonissue to slip from your mind. It really wasn’t worth getting hung up about, and though you could already have been considered passively hostile to the concept of words for other reasons, their seemingly indefinite absence wasn’t really a target of loathing you could get behind. Too abstract. Too pointless. Too goddamn whiny for your tastes.

But then, more than four years later, it happened. You’d had to slip out of the workshop one evening in early July, the air practically boiling from a minor steam accident combined with the usual sweltering summer heat. Most of the time you could handle that kind of thing, had reason enough to just grit your teeth and tough it out, but your vision was actually starting to swim alarmingly, and though you were starting to imagine that you now knew what being baked alive might feel like, it seemed to you like you weren’t sweating nearly as much as you should. That wasn’t a good sign. You’d had heatstroke before, and you never wanted to go through that shit again. Worst of all, it was getting really damn difficult to breathe. All of this added up to you telling yourself, fuck this, you weren’t actually going to kill yourself being stubborn, and so you’d slipped away from your work and into the only marginally cooler men’s locker rooms to shed some layers.

Your loose canvas jacket was a no-brainer, that was definitely gonna have to go, but at the state you were in you knew you were going to have to lose the binder too, unless you really relished swooning in front of the rest of the men. Checking half-heartedly that you were alone, you’d quickly relieved yourself of your tank top, putting it aside before you set to peeling the binder off your damp skin, cursing to yourself as the damn thing seemed to cling to you and fight you every inch of the way like a jealous lover. Once you’d finally struggled free, you emphatically flung it in the direction of your locker and slumped down on one of the rickety benches, combing a hand through your hair in a probably futile attempt to allow some air to touch your scalp. You should put your top back on, you thought, but the idea of anything touching your skin right at the moment made you want to scream. Hell, you’d just have to give yourself a breather, and if anyone else came in he’d better not look in your direction if he knew what was good for him.

You’d glanced down, not because it was exactly something you thought you’d enjoy, but out of morbid curiosity to see what your skin was going to look like after that particular ordeal. And there, shining across your ribs like a green fucking beacon, stark and absolutely unmistakable… was your very first soulmate mark.

Your first thought was that you must be hallucinating, that must be it. But no, your breathing had started slowing down the moment you got the binder off, your vision was fine, nothing else seemed particularly off. Your second impulse was to touch the words, but of course they didn’t really feel like anything at all. They were just light, muted but still very noticeable, staining the tips of your fingers a very faint green when you held them close.

The words read, _I don’t actually know who this “real me’” you’re busting my chops about is supposed to be!_ _I’m sorry, but if you think I’m lying to you… perhaps I’m just a liar._

You don’t know how long you sat there, simply staring at where you’d been branded by the hand of reckless fate; your life claimed by some kind of laughing, sadistic divinity. That was the first time you ever contemplated whether or not there might actually be a god. Because it seemed to you like the only explanation for your current predicament was that someone up there was a _fucking asshole_ , and also had it in for you on a deeply personal level.

You’re also not sure exactly when the numb shock gave away to seething, uncontrollable rage. At the nebulous forces at the universe, yes, but more importantly at whoever the fuck your soulmate was. Because there was just no way of fooling yourself into thinking that he could be unaware of your existence. Whoever he was, the bastard must have an embarrassingly large collection of your words by now, snatches of just about every single inelegant attempt at soul-searching or self-analysis that you’d ever exposed Dave to, chopped out of context and scrawled across a stranger’s skin. For years that had literally been what you’d been hoping for, that if you just kept voicing every little thing about yourself that rang true, eventually something _had_ to stick and tip your soulmate off to the fact that you were _waiting_. Sure, a lot of what you could think of wasn’t exactly flattering, but it didn’t matter, because your soulmate was supposed to- he was supposed to-

No. Fuck no. It was too embarrassing to even contemplate in retrospect.

Then as the years had dragged past with absolutely fucking _nothing_ , not so much as a damn syllable, the written equivalent of radio silence, you’d thought you were safe. That it didn’t really matter what you said anymore, because obviously there was no one out there who would see it, no one out there who would care, no one out there who could possibly be meant to love the person behind your words. There would only be one person who could actually know you and still truly give a shit, and he was already right there with you. So you threw what little discretion you might’ve still held onto to the wind, knowing Dave would never judge you as you worked on unraveling every tangled, spiraling, knotted-up part of yourself when it was just the two of you.

All along… All along your soulmate had been out there, watching you peel yourself to the bone, layer by painful layer. When you thought of some of the things you’d said, some of the horribly cringy bullshit you’d been absolutely certain was so deep and worth saying, instead of metaphorically burying that shit at the crossroads with a stake through its heart and never speaking of it… Some of it must’ve made it through. Who were you kidding? _A lot_ of it. A lot of your appalling fucking personality was out there in the world now, read and re-read by some asshole who never deigned to give you so much as a single fucking word. Not one.

And what had he finally given you now, when you were twenty-one and had actually started to come to terms with not having a soulmate?

_Perhaps I’m just a liar._

Yeah, that was obvious. Because here was the catch about the whole soulmate thing: The words had to be ones your soulmate had communicated to someone directly, person-to-person. Spoken words, sign language, text-to-speech, communication boards, whatever – it didn’t matter as long as it happened in real time and was clearly meant to communicate with another person. Words written in private journals or spoken aloud in private did not count, nor did published books or blog posts or whatever. So for any kind of marks to appear, your soulmate would have to tell someone the truth about himself. However, it seemed as if he’d just decided not to do that, and that was the kind of shit that was hard not to take personally.

Sure, maybe he was just a dishonest person; maybe he had reasons to be, you weren’t quite self-centered enough to assume that the life of this stranger orbited solely around you. He must have his own motivations, you didn’t doubt that for a second. But since he had to know about you, since he had to be aware that there was someone out there that was tied to him just as surely as he was to you… well, was it really too much to ask that he man up and squeeze out just one little truth at some point before now? Even something completely useless like admitting that he’s a liar still felt like something he could’ve said just a bit sooner. Looking at the words he’d used, you really didn’t get the sense that he was substantially younger than you – if anything, you’d say he was older, because who the fuck even said ‘busting my chops’ nowadays? – so that was one benefit of the doubt which you were not going to afford him unless you were straight-up proven wrong.

The point was that it was really damn hard to imagine that he hadn’t done it on purpose. That whatever it was that had stuck on his skin from your mortifying bouts of navel-gazing, it had been enough to make him decide that he didn’t want anything to do with you. And you fucking _resented_ that. You resented _him_ for having the option, for getting to decide if he wanted to vent his entire spleen and half his soul all over a stranger’s skin.

At that point of the reverie, you were interrupted by the low rumble of someone awkwardly clearing their throat somewhere in the vicinity of the door. Your head snapped up and your body tensed defensively, as you remembered that you were still sitting around without either a shirt or a binder between you and the scrutiny of any idiot who happened to wander in. This branch of SKAIA Steam Works employed a lot of people, and you couldn’t say you knew all the guys in the workshop well enough to guess their reaction to a dude sitting around with his tits out in front of god and all the world. You weren’t _scared_ , no, but you were prepared to make your complete lack of humor concerning your body extremely fucking clear.

But when your gaze focused on the intruder, it was just Equius. Some of the wary tension seeped slowly out of your shoulders. His face was dark with embarrassment and he was staring fixedly at a spot on the wall close to the ceiling, which wasn’t exactly what you’d call ideal. After all, in between two guys in a locker room, there was really very little barring outright propositions that warranted such an extreme reaction. But it was certainly better than stupid remarks… or being ogled for all the wrong reasons, for that matter.

“Are you-?” His voice sounded more than a bit strangled, and he seemed aware that this was making the whole situation worse, because he cleared his throat once more before trying again. “How are you doing?” There was only a stiff kind of concern behind the words as far as you could tell; none of the condescending hint of syrup you were particularly allergic to, nor anything that suggested he’d followed you specifically to pry.

“I’m fine,” you said, somehow managing your usual flat affect with very little effort. “It’s hot as balls in there, that’s all.”

“Right,” he said gruffly, nodding. Since the man wasn’t wearing a shirt, and everything he wore including the protective gear was drenched in sweat, you didn’t actually think you needed to convince him of that point. Not that you were looking exactly, but it was hard not to notice the olive green words scrawled across his bulging muscles. You were close enough to pick out the phrase, _I feel like I only really understand people’s feelings in theory,_ which honestly felt like a bit of a call-out. “You ought to… drink some water. Do that before you come back. I’m going to need some assistance with the valve plating.”

“Sure.”

You squinted at him as he nodded rigidly and swiveled around, still without looking directly at you. At the time you weren’t sure if he’d sounded like he was ordering you because of what he’d just seen, or if that was just his weird, haughty personality. According to the permanently oil-smeared troll girl who works next to him, he hails from a family of Olde Worlde Gentry, one of the utterly destitute ones that only have a fancy crest and a collapsing old mansion to their name. But from what you’ve been able to discern from that day onward, he has never treated you any differently, apart from maybe being a tad more polite, which all in all isn’t too bad. He winces every time you swear, but then again, he winces when everyone else swears as well, and honestly that shit’s objectively hilarious.

So that’s alright. That definitely hasn’t been an issue; Equius isn’t the problem. The _problem_ is the stupid mark, which is staying right where it is on your body, shining smugly emerald green in the darkness of your room whenever you’re trying to get some sleep. The problem is words, which have never done you any good in your whole life, and it doesn’t look like that’s about to change anytime soon. The problem is your soulmate, who is out there somewhere, still apparently being careful with everything he says, lest he actually leave anything _meaningful_ on your skin.

You still find yourself wondering if he knows that he’s already slipped up; if he is aware that he’d marked you that one time. Would a habitual liar notice the one moment of complete truthfulness he’d managed during the entire span of his life? You’d think so, but then again, you aren’t much of a liar. Maybe he really believes most of the bullshit he’s said in his life?

Either way, it doesn’t matter. Because clearly he doesn’t want to see you, and the worst thing is that it’s not hard to understand why.

_ Jake _

Your name is Jake English, and you don’t want to be here.

You’ve never much enjoyed parties, although you’d probably have a hard time convincing anyone of this. You’d learned how to sparkle, how to flirt, trained in the art of making yourself the center of attention, and if you’re to be entirely honest with yourself, it’s not as if you don’t enjoy the validation of having people hanging on your every word. Even if the person you make yourself out to be isn’t exactly you, you’re nonetheless responsible for his creation, aren’t you? So in a way that means the praise is still directed at you; it’s just that while everyone _thinks_ they’re fawning over a charming and engaging man, in reality it’s more like they’re appreciating a very well-written character. As both the author and the actor, you think you’re due a little bit of credit at least.

But, well, to tell the truth it’s nerve-wracking. Although you’re very committed to your act, you absolutely wouldn’t count maintaining it as one of your hobbies, or say that you find any particular pleasure in deception. It’s just that you’re well aware of how you would be received and regarded if you allowed your audience to glimpse the nothing behind the mask, and quite frankly that hypothetical scenario is a bit too existential for you to swallow. You don’t really care for introspection or metaphysical quandaries, you certainly have no taste for intimate revelations, and if pressed would have to acknowledge that you have a hard time telling your distaste for such things apart from the scorn you imagine you’d receive if people actually knew what you are like.

Your intricate charades fill a function, that’s all. You would in fact much rather be somewhere else, where no such playacting would be necessary in the first place. At home with your dogs, or down by the stables, or out in the park hunting, or even somewhere in town. Maybe visiting your favorite pub, or partaking of some new masterpiece at the cinema. People seem to think it’s strange when they find out that you are perfectly happy sitting all on your own in the dark of the theater, as if enjoying a fine movie requires the company of others. If you are perfectly honest, however, you actually prefer not to have to think about anything and anyone else except yourself and the wonder on the silver screen. It’s easier that way.

You want to be somewhere, in short, where no one is plying you with drinks or hanging off your arm or laughing loudly at your jokes even when you’re pretty sure that they’re not all that funny. Somewhere you wouldn’t have to guess if that means that they’re laughing _at_ you instead of with you. You’d take being just about anywhere else if that meant you didn’t have to carefully navigate the sensitive politics of who gets to dance with you next. Fishing, you think. It would be so nice to be fishing right now. Which is honestly daft, it’s already dark outside, and fishing in the dark is quite frankly a pain in the old derriere. You imagine trying to bait a hook and shoving it into your thumb instead, and then fumbling around uselessly for an invisible fish in cold water, only to drop your glasses in the water instead. Without your glasses, you tell yourself, you’d also fumble with the keys to the boat, drop them in the water too, find yourself unable to start the boat by hand, and end up having to row all the way back. It would take _hours_ , and you probably wouldn’t reach the shore before dawn.

You sigh longingly. That would be so nice. Because the truth is that you’d like to be somewhere, anywhere, as _far away_ as it’s possible to get from this room, which you unfortunately happen to be sharing not just with a majority of the whole party, but also with Jane.

That sounds so harsh, even when carefully confined to your own thoughts. As you glance guiltily in her direction, she’s looking every bit as radiant as the moment when she first walked in. Her hair is meticulously pinned into place with dozens of little glittering red stars, beautifully matched by the equally scarlet scarf draped loosely in diaphanous folds about her shoulders, and offset by the deep blue and very smartly cut dress. It’s not a romantic dress, nor a shy one; it’s a dress that dares anyone in the room to suggest that her body or her position in life isn’t suitable for something so bold. Her lips are painted a dark carmine, and her stiletto heels look sharp enough to kill a man with. You would very much like to not be that man.

You pull nervously at your gloves, an old habit that is hard to shake. The room is rather warm and you’d like to be able to take them off, but… no. No, it’s bad enough as it is, without you putting the mass of orange words which haunt almost every part of your body on prominent display. Not that everyone doesn’t already know. But you don’t want to give anyone even half an excuse to whisper about Jane.

You’d never intended to do something so controversial, never wanted to draw the eyes of the world in such a way. But one day she had asked you rather archly when you were planning to propose, and what were you supposed to say? She’d first asked you to be her boyfriend when you were both fourteen, sitting on the log across the stream on her family’s estate, and you remember thinking well, why not? Being boyfriend and girlfriend wasn’t that much of a commitment, and after all, she was your best friend! If she wanted to hold hands and kiss for a while, if she thought that would make her happy, then you didn’t mind going along with it. But kisses had turned to caresses, and where the caresses ended there were hastily undone buttons, and the buttons in turn led you like a trail of breadcrumbs to things you’d never considered when you first said yes to her. You’d never found a place where it seemed reasonable to say no, because if you hadn’t minded everything that came before that point, then why was it such a problem now?

What reason, in short, could you give her for having led her on all this time, only to deny her this? If you’d told her no, that you couldn’t, that you were still waiting for your soulmate… well, that would be a lie. You weren’t waiting at all; ‘hiding’ would be a more accurate word. You’d never told her about it, she’d never asked, but if your soulmate was the reason why the two of you couldn’t be together, then nothing would’ve stopped you from saying as much that day on the log, and you both knew it.

As much as you had already lied to her about, you couldn’t quite choke out such a pitiful excuse, knowing that you’d never be able to convince her. Besides… she loved you, didn’t she? Why shouldn’t you make her happy, when you were never going to meet that soulmate of yours anyway?

So you’d proposed, and people had predictably talked. It had been quite a scandal, and you think sourly to yourself that it had been an even bigger scandal than necessary simply because rich people love nothing more than to be outraged. It gives them something to do. Gossip was the inevitable consequence of someone who was known to have a soulmate marrying somebody who didn’t. There were a lot of nasty words people liked to use about someone like Jane – in particular, you noted, about _women_ like Jane – and there were quite a few unkind ones about you as well. But in general, your transgression appeared to be more easily dismissed on grounds of being foolish, being misled, or simply being unaware of what you were doing. You’d worked hard by then to achieve this oblivious persona, after all, and once the news of your engagement broke you found that you’d done a much better job of it than even you had anticipated.

Jane had been ostracized. People would call her mercenary, a bond-wrecker; they would call her callous and manipulative, and they would make it impossible for her to go anywhere without being followed by whispers. She had worn a classical white dress for your wedding day, a romantic dress, so much softer than anything she wears nowadays, and the whisperers had sneered at what was seen as a false display of modesty and decorum. Even now, when that dress is no doubt in dust bags in the far depths of her closet, if she still has it at all, and to the best of your knowledge she never again wore her wedding ring after she threw it at you… even now, they talk. Even now she cannot go anywhere without nasty looks thrown her way and honeyed barbs hidden in every other word spoken to her. And she absolutely cannot be in the same room as you without having to suffer the pitying looks that you draw.

You grimace in discomfort and reach for a glass of cordial on a passing attendant’s tray, but try as you might, its sweetness can’t quite wash the bad taste that lingers in your mouth. It’s funny, really, in a not actually funny at all kind of way, but another reason you wish people could just mind their own damn business is that the general consensus on the matter had made you think that the soulmate thing would be the biggest issue in your marriage, and had planned accordingly. Foolish, really; a thoughtless assumption based on wishful thinking, but a seductively easy one to make. You’d cast yourself and her as star-crossed lovers, reassuring yourself that with such an obvious adversary to your happiness, every struggle you had would be somehow romantic. Just like a story.

In fact it wasn’t the taboo she’d broken that made being married to Jane impossible in the end, nor was your soulmate the reason you could never kiss or hold her with the passion she deserved. Lying to her about having a soulmate had never been an option, not when she’d been there the day the very first mark appeared – so in a sense, that had been the _least_ of your problems. She’d always known, always accepted it. But there were so many other things you’d easily managed to conceal, and so many expectations she had of you which you simply could not fulfill.

You had been nineteen when you got married, twenty-two when you divorced about half a year ago. You have no idea when, if ever, people will find something better to do than to hunch over what remains of your ill-advised romance like a bunch of craven vultures. Surely there cannot possibly be much meat left on those particular bones, and whatever there is ought to leave anyone possessed of even a shred of decency with a taste just as sour as the one that still clings to your tongue.

There had been nothing for it this particular evening, much to your regret. Whenever possible you try to avoid any engagement where you might run into her, and though you haven’t spoken on the matter, you suspect that she does the same when her schedule allows it. But tonight, in fact, there is no wriggling out of the obligation to be seen by and rub elbows with some particularly interesting potential business partners and SSW investors, and as it happens there will also be those present who require the attendance of the Crocker heiress and de facto iron fist in charge of every single aspect of the eponymous company. So here you are, and there’s your ex wife, and if the floor were to crack open and cast the whole party into some undisclosed abyss then you’re afraid that you would have very few complaints.

Someone suddenly tugs playfully at your hair, a far too intimate gesture for the setting and one that makes you intensely uncomfortable. You turn around to find an enormous glittering smile wrapped in a neon green silk dress chattering lightly at you, the words unintelligible because you weren’t expecting speech and the room is busy with other sounds. A couple of jeweled hands snake up your chest and over your shoulders, and you suppress a horrible impulse to suplex the woman right onto a table full of rather nasty prawn canapes. You know you can’t actually do that, but this sort of thing activates your fight-or-flight reflexes right away.

Unfortunately, although you’re widely accepted to be off the dating-and-marrying market for anyone who isn’t your soulmate, you are on the other hand considered _extremely_ eligible for those who are interested in neither of those things. This includes both markless flirts, as well as those among the marked who have not yet found their soulmate and wish to experiment. Since it’s already been publicly established that you’re not saving yourself for your soulmate, quite an alarming number within the kind of high society you surround yourself with interpret this as a complete free-for-all. No one has yet thought to ask you how you feel on the matter.

“Do you want to dance,” says The Smile, and this also isn’t really a question.

“No,” you reply, startled into a certain degree of sincerity.

“What?” The Smile falters into a Baffled and Petulant Frown.

“I said no.” You firmly remove her hands from your shoulders, and somewhere inside you a hairline crack is racing wildly along the surface of your resolve to keep it together.

“Why not?” B&PF demands, with more candor than decorum, a twitch of her lips suggesting that she’s holding back a more dissatisfied – and probably unflattering – expression than the current one.

“I think you might have gotten the entirely wrong end of the stick here, madame,” you say, feeling bright and brittle as ice coming apart under the onslaught of the spring sun, and just about as exposed. “That wasn’t a simple ‘no’ to the concept of cutting a rug in general, far from it. I’m not much of a word-mincer, and I meant it as nothing short of a full, ‘no, I don’t believe I want to’. I feel that not wanting to is a perfectly copacetic reason in itself, and I admit I don't see why I should have to bandy with any further explanations or parry impertinent questions. No offense meant, of course. Now, if you would excuse me...”

But it seems like she wants to get the last word in. The last _very loud_ words. “Well I don’t see why that fat, fate-snatching cow is so much better than-”

“Oh, excuse me, can I-” You reach for another drink from a nearby attendant, and the moment you have it in your hand you turn back as if to hear her out, fumble comically with your full glass, and tip the whole thing right down the front of her dress. This time, you’d gone for the red wine. “Well, I’ll be knuckleblasted! I’m sorry, madame, I will of course pay for the dress,” you say, patting ineffectually at the spreading stain with your handkerchief while she stares at you, completely silent and alarmingly pale with anger. “Damn, that’s pretty stubborn, isn’t it?” You rub a bit harder at the mess, clearly only managing to work the liquid into the fibers more. “Ah, that somehow looks worse… I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve never been very technical!”

People around you are laughing now, not doing nearly as much to hide it behind their hands or their fans as they could. Your unwanted admirer, aside from being livid, looks positively horrified at how stupid you’re acting, humiliation and rejection curdling quickly into contempt. She looks like she’s contemplating a slap, and you brace yourself for it, preparing to stagger away from her more dramatically than necessary, bringing to mind your very best wounded expression, one which you’d practiced on Jane more times than was fair. But her grapes having gone sour on her so quickly, the woman seems to come to the conclusion that you’re not worth it, and instead spins around and sweeps away without a word, for which you’re very grateful.

Some eyes follow her, the rest remain on you. You sigh and stuff your probably ruined handkerchief back in your pocket, and grab another drink.


	2. Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are dogs; Jake contemplates truth, and why he considers it an imposition; Dirk is the perfect gentleman; the author reveals that they’ve had recent car troubles and are still bitter; Legally Blonde the Musical is obliquely referenced; dinner is had; the shoes are never recovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as a brief warning, this chapter had a character drink alcohol while pregnant. not a lot, but i thought i should warn for it anyway? idk.

_ Jake _

So you’d done the bare minimum of socializing required and then, not to put too fine a point to it, you’d scarpered like the big poltroon that you are. Holed up in your room at home, with your dogs taking up so much of your bed that you can barely sit down, you finally feel like you can breathe properly again. You tug at your bow tie until it comes loose, undoing a couple of shirt buttons and running a finger along the line of your collar with a sigh of relief. Next on the agenda is your gloves. Distracted and tired, you find your hands lingering on the buttons as your mind wanders, your gaze drifting through the window to the hazy moon suspended just above the treetops in the park. The inside of your room isn’t much brighter. Much of your family’s old manor has electricity installed, of course, but you actually prefer the light of the old gas lamps, and you had dimmed them as far as they would go the moment you had them lit. If that had been so you wouldn’t have to look yourself in the eye when you passed your mirror, well, the least said the better.

Once you’ve finally unbuttoned your gloves and set them aside on the bedside table, smoothing them down with an idle gesture, you try to avoid looking down at your hands as you shed your jacket, shirt and pants. A silly strategy, you know, since the more you undress, the more inescapable your usual skin situation becomes.

You sigh, gently shoving Sasha out of the way so that you may at least lay down on a small patch of bedding that isn’t covered in sprawling dog limbs. She flails her paws at you, and then gives your cheek a single dignified lick before curling up practically on top of her brother and sister by the foot of the bed. You stretch out as well as you can manage, and though your room is a bit on the nippy side, you don’t pull your blankets up just yet. Instead you find yourself once again following the loops and swirls of the words running up and down and all over your body. Of course there is still plenty of untouched skin; the words are really quite small, as if accommodating for the fact that there are already so many of them. Maybe they are. You won’t pretend to know how the whole fate thing works. Your hands and lower arms, however, are covered in words, and your left leg is getting there. In low light like this, it almost looks as if your hands are uniformly orange if you squint, the gentle glow suffusing even the skin that for the sake of legibility has to remain untouched.

Strange, really. You’d think that a bright amber like this would be hard to read against light brown skin, especially when there are so many words, but somehow every single one stands out as starkly as the day you received them. Angling your hand, you read, _Half of building an identity seems to consist of digging up your own shoddy foundations_ , written along the side of your thumb and all the way down to your wrist. You sigh. You rather wish that you felt like you had foundations, and not just the confusing remains of what someone buried in the earth and left behind long ago. Which is unfair, you know it is. Your grandmother had been an amazing woman, and she’d done her very best to leave you with good values and important life lessons. Her life hadn’t been as easy as the name might English imply to some, and it had been important to her to give you the tools to not take your good fortune for granted.

She’d done her best, and the accident that took her away from you hadn’t been her fault. Nor is it her fault that, though you try to live a life she at least wouldn’t be ashamed of, it’s been long since you actually believed yourself capable of doing her proud.

A twist and flick of a wrist, and you can see one of the shortest marks you’ve got written on your palm. _I’m a guy. My name is Dirk_. That one had turned up when you were nine or so, and it had confused the dickens out of you, seeing as how it just seemed like rather basic information to actually count as a ‘fundamental truth’. It had made you feel guilty, too, because you’d assumed that it was aimed directly at you. Surely it had to be an attempt to somehow make you take notice, by stating the glaringly obvious and hoping it would transfer?

Well, you’re a prize tomfool, and of course it wasn’t. It had just taken you a while to work that out. Jane had been just as nonplussed by it, and it was only when an old pen pal of yours told you that she’d like you to call her Jade that the penny finally dropped on you. It had been falling for a while by then, and hit with the appropriate amount of force for something that had actual years to accelerate through the apparent vacuum filling your noggin. Some things weren’t in fact as obvious as all that, and in retrospect you were sorry for interpreting anything so deeply personal as a cheap bid for your attention. You found yourself wishing that you could apologize for your baseless conjectures, but how exactly were you going to put that?

“ _Golly gee, I’m sorry I thought trying to jog my gourd a bit and get me to actually talk to you counted as a fundamental truth about you, it’s just that you being a fella didn’t actually come as much of a surprise even then, so I guess it never crossed my mind that things weren’t quite clear as a bell on your end!”_

First of all, that was a bit long, and that’s saying something, considering the chap in question is clearly a wordy sort himself. Secondly, you weren’t at all confident that just being sorry could really count as a fundamental truth. Thirdly, was this really the first thing you wanted to put on his body if you did? And fourthly, who the devil were you supposed to say it to? The only truly close friend you had was Jane, and by then you were already going out with her, which certainly would put a bit of a damper on any kind of missive to your soulmate. Not to mention how you didn’t much fancy expounding on exactly how unsurprising you by now found it that your soulmate was a man.

It feels like you’ve always been like this. You put your hand over your eyes, the soft radiance of the words creating a tiny glowing cave which lights up the inside of your eyelids. There just never seems to be enough truth, and even when there does, it never seems to be the right _kind_. Either it’s something you wouldn’t wish on the poor bastard in a million years, or it’s something you’d never want to speak to a single soul _except_ for him. Of course, the more you’ve stalled, and the more you’ve found yourself picking your words with care to avoid any downright ass-backward nonsense cluttering up his skin, the harder it becomes to imagine ever letting him know you’re there at all. After all, imagine the disappointment! For him to wait all that time, only to get something you’d no doubt regret the moment it passes your lips… no, the very thought is enough to almost give you the screaming meemies.

Every word of his you read only served to further convince you that you just couldn’t face turning that kind of investigation upon yourself, because there was no way you wouldn’t fall short. That was no fault of his, abso-diddle-lutely dicking not! No matter how many unflattering or even alarming things he ended up confessing all across your old hide – after all, who can say that they would end up looking their best selves if only judged on the products of eavesdropping? You’re still convinced that he is in fact a decent, upstanding fellow deep down, because who else would be so deeply bothered by every single jot and tiddle of his own darker nature, if he didn’t actually want to be so much better than that? No, that’s not the problem at all. It’s just that the damn words had started turning up when you were only just turned _five_ , and even back then it had been clear what a brave, brilliant youngster he’d been. And though there’s more than a few contradictory statements on your body at this point, he nonetheless always seems so _certain_ each and every time.

Well, of course he’s certain. Every single mark is the _truth_ , or at least was at the moment it ended up on you.

You’re never going to be like him. Even if through some accident you’ve actually managed to say something that’s stuck on him at this point, you can’t imagine it’s anything that’s made him one iota more eager to see you. Someone like that, someone like the man you’ve put together like a jigsaw puzzle from the bits and pieces of him that you’ve scavenged, is simply not the sort to find anything worth keeping in someone like you. Perhaps you’d be able to play the part well enough, dress yourself in a persona worthy of your counterpart, but what good would that be? All he’d have to do is look down, and he’d know what kind of hollow rot you were trying to sell him.

Somehow Fate must’ve made a mistake. And as much as you might wish to tell yourself that you’re keeping mum for his sake, if you were to tell anyone, you’re absolutely convinced that _those_ words wouldn’t turn up on him either. You’re selfish, that’s all. You cannot stand the humiliation, the scrutiny, the _rejection_. Better to never have to weigh your heart against his expectations at all, than to have the bitter truth confirmed.

Fuck you running, you’re so tired, but somehow closing your eyes only seems to have given the old thought-crank a few extra turns. In defeat you move your hand, letting it come to rest across your throat. You can’t see or feel it, of course, but you don’t need anything except memory to put your palm right across your very first mark, hiding it from the world. In your mind’s eye, you can see Jane’s blue eyes go wide, her shiny round cheeks hollowing ever so slightly in shock as her mouth fell open. _Look look!_ she’d said excitedly, pointing, and then she’d laughed at your expression when you tried, pushing your chin down as far as it would go in a futile attempt to see what she was pointing at. You’d asked if it was a bug, voice trembling, and she’d wrinkled her nose and laughed even harder. No, she said, not a gross bug at all. It was _words_!

She’d exhaled that last word with such awe, you’d stopped your pointless gymnastics, staring at her until the words finally started to make sense. You can’t even remember what you’d been feeling back then. You think you were happy, but that’s just a line you recite to yourself, trying to make it believable to a non-existent audience. It’s not a real sensation to connect to the words, the moment, the revelation, let alone anything you can bring yourself to feel now. It’s been too long.

_We’ll go somewhere much better one day. It won’t always be like this. I promise._

Words of reassurance, spoken to someone near and dear. A private moment stolen from his lips, like so many others, and given to someone who simply does not deserve it. No one will ever be a good enough liar to make you believe anything else, not even you.

_ Dirk _

You’re heading home from a long day of work, opting to walk instead of taking the rattling monstrosity of a bus that had vomited out a whole gaggle of drunk sportsball supporters right in front of you as you stepped out into the cool February air. The steam engines on the old models don’t really acknowledge the concept of gears, nor can much credit be given to the very rudimentary attempt at suspension. Meaning they only really have two speeds, ‘breakneck’ or ‘complete standstill’, and while in motion will hit every single pothole as if driven by a personal grudge. What your tired thigh- and ass muscles don’t need right now is to attempt to remain standing under such conditions, _especially_ if falling over is likely to land you in the lap of the sort of man who would unflinchingly wear a vest embroidered with a beer logo.

Besides, tiredness aside, you enjoy walking. You don’t live in what you’d call a safe part of town, sure, but that’s not a problem for anyone except whichever asshole might prove himself terminally stupid enough to try to give you trouble. So you cut through the petering-out stream of evening traffic, absently dodging scuttlebuggies and bikes, weave through the crowds on the larger promenades, and then slip onto more deserted streets with a wonderful sense of tension releasing in your chest. Here and there a pair of headlights circling the black latticework of canopies crowning a park, a few other pedestrians who avoid your gaze as much as you avoid theirs, and the noise level reduced to a steady hum and the occasional siren. Perfect. In the midst of the light pollution scattering off the permanent haze of steam above, you can see a couple of pale stars trying to make their mark on the blue backdrop of night, and a distorted sliver of an orange moon hooked coquettishly on the top of a skyscraper, like a lemon on the side of a cocktail.

Not to be too sentimental about it, but it’s the sort of evening that makes you feel like this city is a part of you in a way which is less like shrapnel stuck in your flesh, and more like a central organ.

“Fuck, fuck, ffff _ffffrack_! Aughhhh.”

Someone else is clearly having a decidedly less pleasant evening. You raise your eyebrows slightly, because you’re pretty sure no one else is around, so you can’t help wryly admiring the herculean effort to self-censor. Unless whoever is now trying to hold back a couple of borderline panicked sobs does in fact have company. You can’t hear anyone, though.

You grimace to yourself. On a list of all the things you feel well equipped to deal with, tears rank somewhere just between ‘heavy machinery while drugged’ and ‘debating consent in bars with guys named Brett’. But on the other hand, if the crying person is in fact alone on the relatively narrow side-street the voice seems to be emanating from, you’d feel really fucking bad about just walking past without at least offering to help. Hesitantly, you pop your head around the corner, squinting up the street. The street light above appears to be out, and the problem with wearing shades all the time is that you actually can’t see worth a damn in the dark. After a moment of helpless straining, you in fact do have to take them off and hang them from the neckline of your shirt.

It’s a woman in a very modern-looking coat and skirt, all sharp lines and streamlined silhouette, not a bustle or lace fringe in sight. The plunging neckline _does_ look rather cold in the current weather, but since you’re in a fur-trimmed vest and rolled-up shirt sleeves, perhaps you don’t get to talk. The woman is leaning against a wall, trying to shake life into a clearly dead cellphone, while her car is… wow. Wedged at an awkward diagonal in the narrow space, clearly not going up or down without some help. Damn, that’s a shitty situation to be in, and aversion to tears or not, you seem like the only one around that might be able to help her.

After you’ve opened your mouth, but before you’ve managed to say anything, she lets out an aggravated little scream and gives her very expensive-looking car a kick. Since she picked the front as the target for her frustration, the extremely narrow heel of her shoe immediately gets caught in the grill, causing her to wobble precariously, since the cobblestones underfoot aren’t in fact made for one-legged acrobatics, let alone in high heels. But she wins a lot of points with you when she almost immediately catches herself, and with great presence of mind pulls her foot out of the shoe. The fact that she then proceeds to kick the other one at least twenty yards up the other side of the alley, before wrenching loose the stuck pump and launching it in the same direction, you will more reluctantly count in her favor. On one hand, someone throwing away a pair of expensive shoes obviously rankles a bit, but on the other hand… you understand the sentiment.

“Hey. Can I help you, ma’am?”

She looks up at you, as if regretting that she didn’t keep at least one shoe to use as an impromptu weapon. Then her hand goes to her pocket, and you’re guessing she probably keeps one of those discreet and very deadly little troll-made pistols there. “I’m warning you, mister, if this is the preamble to some sort of half-baked attempt to make advances, I’ll-”

You don’t actually manage to hold back your appalled grimace, and just so she won’t misunderstand you, you decide to cut that particular train of thought short. “Ma’am, I’m a whole homosexual. I’m not about to advance on anything you’ve got, no offense meant.”

You distinctly hear her murmur something like, “That’s all you know, bucko,” but only a moment later she nonetheless relaxes visibly, her hand sinking slowly into a more natural position. You think to yourself that you _could_ just be an ordinary robber; you technically never said anything about your intentions toward the pearls around her neck. But there’s a time and a place to joke about that kind of thing, and when trying to actually help a woman still walking in only thin silk stockings on the very edge of hysteria… well, that’s not it. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she says, and even bows her head graciously, which catches you by surprise. She’s definitely dressed like someone who would usually address you as ‘boy’ despite being the same age as you. “I’m just not having the best night, as you can see.”

You nod in response to her brittle little laugh, eyeing her car. “How-?” you begin, looking for a tactful way to finish that question. But let’s be honest, there really isn’t one, and to be honest that one word more or less expresses everything you need to say in the form of a statement. “How,” you repeat flatly, raising an eyebrow.

She laughs again, a tad damply, dabbing at her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. ‘ _J._ _I_ _.C.E._ ’ in flowing letters across fine white cotton, edged in those little blue flowers you have a vague recollection that people get sentimental about. No ring on her finger, but her hair is short, which among rich people is mainly something you see on married women. Since she’s probably too young to be a widow, you’d guess that she’s making a statement about her work ethic, since fuck knows that the upper crust is still completely up their own asses about women being in charge and living independently. All of this is conjecture, of course, but when have you ever been able to stop your mind from running away with you if given half a fucking chance.

“Let’s see,” she says, giving her car an unfriendly look, “I tried to take a shortcut up this street, and halfway up, poof, the engine cut out! I stepped on the brake, but I couldn’t get it to start again, and to be honest I didn’t feel too good about letting it just sit halfway up the slope while I went to get help. So I thought if I just put it in neutral and let it roll back out...” She sighs, making a helpless little gesture. “Well, then this. I’m not sure how.”

You get a bit closer to the car, since the engine at the back is half rammed up against the wall of the nearby building. It’s fairly old but very well taken care of, state of the craft, and it’s making little musical sounds as it slowly cools down. You can’t actually touch it yet, but you don’t need to. The ground beneath your feet is wet, and in this weather it must’ve gotten so pretty recently, or you’d be trying to keep your balance on an ice slick instead. “On the positive side of things, it’s just one of your water tanks that must’ve sprung a leak. The right one, specifically. Which is why, when you put the car in neutral and let it roll downhill, the much heavier left side caused the whole damn thing to immediately swerve counter-clockwise, and with no pressure left in the system to aid with steering, I’m guessing you lost control of the wheel at that point.”

“Oh.” There’s surprise in her voice, her bottom lip is still trembling, but the look she gives you is one of steady appraisal. “Would you mind telling me exactly what I’m supposed to feel positive about?”

“Well, it’s an easy enough fix.” You shrug. “The obvious downside is that fixing it _here_ is an absolute no-go, and just the two of us sure as fuck aren’t going to be enough to shift it.” You fish your phone out of your pocket. It’s a cheap piece of shit, of course, but at least it’s the _best_ cheap piece of shit on the market, and with the help of a goldblood friend of yours you’ve managed to jailbreak it and make it almost decent. More importantly, it’s not currently out of juice, which is more than you can say for her phone. “You want me to call the drones for you? They’ll be able to just fly it out of here and drop it off at the nearest SKAIA workshop.”

“Oh, would you?” Her eyes are definitely tearing up again. Shit. “I’m sorry to be such a bother, I’ve just never- it’s never- oh gee, look at me, I’m not usually in such a state.” She leans against the brick wall behind her and slowly sinks down until she’s sitting on the street, apparently heedless of how cold the cobblestones must be or what a mess they have to be making of her nice red coat. Her legs are awkwardly folded to one side, and you can clearly see the gray smudges on her white stockings from standing around without her shoes. For a moment she seems to be battling for control of her expression, and then apparently gives up on it, burying her face in her hands. You expect the loud, violent sobs of a rich girl who suddenly finds one of life’s little hardships happening to her, because well, isn’t that exactly what’s happening? But the little sounds that manage to escape her hands are muffled, tightly controlled, the tears of someone who is well aware that she’s embarrassing herself and everyone else present, but who cannot hold back no matter how hard she tries.

You watch her helplessly for a moment, and then your practical nature takes over. You call up the Drone Center and wait patiently as you’re directed and redirected again, until you’re finally able to talk to an actual person. The troll on the other end of the line is not exactly holding back those little whirring sounds that in your experience tend to signify snide amusement as you explain the situation, but you’re not about to make a stink about that. It _is_ patently ridiculous, and fuck it, anyone working the phone center at the drone traffic division probably needs to take their chuckles wherever they can get them. You hang up after being assured that an airship is on the way, and hesitate for a moment, weighing your options. The girl is still on the ground, clearly trying to get her feelings under control, but not making much headway.

Since her face is still hidden, you don’t bother hiding your grimace of distaste at the whole situation, but even so you swing yourself easily over the front of her car a moment later. Sitting down on the street next to her seems like it might be misconstrued, so you settle for squatting down with your back against the brick wall, arms resting easily on your knees. “You… doing okay there?” An idiotic question, but the best you can come up with.

“I’m so sorry,” she says again. “You must think I’m being rather dramatic.”

“A bit,” you admit, because hell, why deny the obvious? Her car broke down, that’s more or less it. She clearly has enough money to pay for any and all repairs necessary, hail a cab, and be home within the hour, somewhere nice and clean with staff to cook for her and heating that actually works as it should. It’s not a disaster. It’s definitely not worth crying about.

“Well, you’re right,” she says in a choked voice, pulling out her handkerchief once again and making an attempt to rub the mascara off her cheeks with grim determination. “I’m making a fool of myself over nothing at all, and somehow that only makes it worse.” A wry smile pulls at her lips. Her lipstick is slightly smudged as well. “It’s just… I had to sit around for _hours_ listening to those old idiots who think they can do _my_ job and send me off with a sweetie and a pat on the head, I’ve been awake since dawn because I couldn’t sleep, this car used to be my father’s and he _never_ had an issue with it, my feet hurt, I’m _definitely_ pregnant and I just-” She simply buries her face in the handkerchief this time, letting out a sharp, aggravated little sound.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” you say, before remembering that not everyone who has to drag a uterus around would consider having it occupied with a parasitic proto-human an absolute goddamn disaster. “Shit, I didn’t mean- Am I supposed to congratulate you or nah?”

She actually giggles then, the sound coming out a bit wobbly, but less helpless than before. She takes a deep breath and folds the handkerchief over, wiping rather more effectively under her eyes. “Please don’t. You’ve been so nice, I feel like it would be absolutely terrible manners if I had to sock you.” She winks, and you refrain from saying that you’d be downright fucking astonished if she could manage to land so much as a finger on you. You don’t want her to think that you’re condescending to her, and it really isn’t because she’s a girl; hell, she’s a head taller and probably weighs twice as much as you, so if she actually got you down you’d be in trouble. It’s just that you’re you, so that’d be incredibly unlikely. “Also you once again have to forgive me, you certainly weren’t asking for an entire autobiography.”

“It’s fine,” you say, your attempt at a shrug falling somewhat short since you’re still leaning against the wall, but she can probably interpret the small twitch for what it was. “If you’d ever talked to my brother, you’d know you can’t possibly be worse than him.” Wow. You’re such a raging dick, aren’t you? How was that helpful? “Anyway, I really don’t mind. You’re having a fucked-up day, you need to vent, it happens.”

“Perhaps.” She fishes a compact mirror from some mysterious compartment in her coat, and quickly removes the rest of her renegade make-up from where it shouldn’t go. Then she pats some powder onto her nose with the air of a defeated general picking up his sword and deciding to charge anyway; her tears appear to have dried up completely. “I’d still like to thank you for your forbearance.” The smile she flashes you this time is perfectly crafted and impenetrable, like a battering ram aimed at the whole world. “I haven’t had dinner yet. How about you?”

...Yeah, pride has its place, but you’re absolutely not turning down a free meal. “I could eat,” you say, as if the last meal you’d had wasn’t a slightly stale meat’n’veg sandwich with very little in the way of actual meat _or_ veg.

“Wonderful! Let’s just wait for the drones, then, and I know just the place.”

“Alright.” A brief beat, but man, you gotta ask. “What about your shoes?”

“ _Hang_ my shoes.”

“Fair.”

* * *

It’s slightly surreal how you ended up here, inside this stupidly high-end restaurant that would normally have turned you away after just one glance at your threadbare clothes. But your new friend had just swept in with the self-assurance of, you have to assume, literal centuries of breeding, and had carried your soot-stained and sweaty self along in her wake. No one had said anything about her lack of shoes either, as she asked for the ‘usual’ table and handed someone her coat, indicating impatiently that they should take your vest as well. People running off with your clothes felt weird, but you weren’t about to show it.

It was only when you’d walked into the properly lit interior that you’d realized you still hadn’t put your shades back on, and quickly slipped them back where they belong. Your companion had raised her eyebrows slightly, but she didn’t comment, which you appreciate. Being able to mind your own fucking business is a rare gift indeed.

The maitre d’ glides over as if he’s greased the underside of his shoes to be able to move as obsequiously as humanly possible. “Miss Crocker,” he gushes, “a pleasure as always. Would you and your-” A fraction of a pause, just enough to be noticed but not long enough to point out. “-guest like drinks?”

“Red wine for me,” she replies smoothly, clearly determined not to notice even the slightest indication that you don’t belong here. You’re honestly glad, because it gives you a moment to bite down on your own surprise and maintain your neutral expression. “A malbec, I think.” Then you see her suddenly hesitating, an expression of guilt pinching her face, and it takes you a moment to register why. She gives you a half-defiant look, as if expecting you to condemn her for being irresponsible, but you just shrug and raise your eyebrows slightly, trying with minimal mimicry to indicate exactly how little you give a fuck. It’s not your business to tell her she can’t have a single glass of wine; you’re not her doctor and you’re not the defender of the sanctity of a clump of cells that may or may not become a person. You see some of the tension letting go of her, though the way she glances down momentarily suggests that she’s not entirely at her ease yet, though she hides it well. “And for you, my dear?” she asks, voice steady

Personally, you simply don’t like anything that slows your reflexes, lowers your inhibitions, makes you more vulnerable. You’re about to ask for mineral water, since that’s probably the more acceptable nonalcoholic alternative in a place like this. Then you think, fuck acceptable, you’re absolutely not going to pretend to like overpriced seltzer just to make some judgmental twerp in a bow tie more comfortable with your presence. “Soda,” you reply with a shrug. “Orange, if you have it.”

The woman opposite you doesn’t so much as crack a smile at the visible confusion and more covert disdain you’re met with; she only stares the man down with eyes the unreal colour of tropical sea water. “That would be all,” she says, perfectly pleasant, and he leaves.

Deciding that this is enough fucking about, you sit up a bit straighter and reach your hand across the table at her. “Dirk Strider,” you say. “I don’t think I actually said.”

“Oh! Good grief, you’re right, where _are_ my manners?” She takes your hand in hers, and you feel the gentle pressure of the perfect points on her bright red nails against your skin. For a moment when you said your name, you thought you’d seen her eyes widen very slightly, as if a thought had struck her, but now you’re not sure. “Jane Crocker. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr Strider.”

You’d held it together passably well when you first heard her name, but… holy shit, Jane _fucking_ Crocker. You live neither under a rock nor in a hole in the ground, so obviously you know who she is. Her name is on the damn company, after all, and now that you actually _look_ at her you can see a passing resemblance to a face you’ve occasionally glanced briefly in press photos or news snippets, but haven’t exactly paid much attention to before now. CrockerCorp management is not what you’d call high on your list of priorities, and though she’d also been briefly married to the man who owns a controlling share in the company you work for, you can genuinely say that you care even _less_ about that. Who actually gives a shit about rich people’s sordid affairs or who was in charge of what, it wasn’t as if that would have any impact on your job or your life.

That’s not a sentiment that you’re in any way revising now, though perhaps you can make a bit of an effort not to think disparaging things about the publicly disastrous nature of their union, with one of the people involved right in front of you. Unsurprisingly, from what little information you’ve retained about her, she seems like an intelligent and driven woman. The part that does take you aback just a little is that she also comes across as someone genuinely interesting to get to know, despite how everything she’s every achieved had been handed to her on a silver platter, and only has anything to do with her intelligence and drive in the sense that she’s not stupid enough to have knocked said metaphorical platter over and taken a shit on it.

She tucks a lock of her glossy black hair behind her ear, looking a little bit self-conscious, which tells you that your intense scrutiny has definitely gone on for too long. You don’t quite have it in you to act apologetic about it, but you allow your gaze to drift away, taking in the mostly empty restaurant. You suppose that a Psiiday evening isn’t usually a time when people usually find themselves compelled to shell out unreasonable amounts of money on fried dragon liver pate, or whatever the fuck it is this place serves.

Jane laughs softly. “I’m afraid,” she says, apparently reading your mind, or possibly just extrapolating from what’s already pretty evident, “that I can’t have done very much to improve the sort of impression you must already have of people like me. I suppose I might say in my own defense that I really am not in very good form tonight, but well, everyone has troubles. That’s really no reason to throw shoes around and burst into tears in the middle of the street.”

You shrug. You’ve already registered your opinion on that matter, and there’s really no need for you to rub it in any further. Besides, with the context of knowing exactly who she is, you begin to have a little more sympathy with her aggravated feelings. Having newly had a very humiliating divorce smeared all over the tabloids, you can see why being pregnant now is a less than an ideal situation even for someone who doesn’t personally curse their womb and can’t wait to tear it out as a bloody offering to any deity or vengeful spirit who will have it. Especially since you’d wager that the pregnancy in question must’ve come about at the very earliest when the divorce was finalized. Not that you’re an expert, but you’re pretty sure that even on Jane’s curvaceous figure it ought to be a lot more obvious if she was further along than that. If you were to make a guess, you’d say it must’ve happened _after_ the divorce, which leaves a number of options as to how that happened, and none of them is likely to make the press take mercy on her.

Add no sleep, job troubles and a broken-down car to that, and you still absolutely wouldn’t be crying in public, but you can sort of see why someone else might.

“To be honest,” you say, and then you’re momentarily distracted as a waitress materializes in front of you and puts down your glass of Extra Fancy Fanta. She has a dark red little hair clip next to her left horn, and she’s hovering a notebook and a pen in front of her, offering you a glossy and slightly expectant smile. You realize that you probably should’ve been looking at the menu in front of you, but Jane just lifts her own glass and gently waves the girl away. You tap the menu distractedly. “Where was I? Oh, yeah, right. I don’t particularly think you had anything to apologize for in the first place, and if you’d actually made a terrible impression on me then trust me, I wouldn’t even be here.” That borders a bit on a white lie, because you would probably have followed her regardless, stuffed yourself on her dime, and maybe found some subtle way of getting her banned from the restaurant if she’d _really_ pissed you off. Still, the _spirit_ of the statement holds mostly true. “You were having a shit evening, and I didn’t mind helping out because I’m not a _complete_ bastard. Now, for the cheap price of telling you exactly why your car was screwed up and making one relatively short phone call, you’re offering me dinner. I’d say that’s pretty generous returns for a gesture of basic fucking decency.”

She smiles, sipping her wine. “Not just that,” she says, her tone gentle and almost chiding. “You forgot the most important part.”

“That being?” you say, mimicking her gesture and sipping your fizzy drink with equal elegance, which makes her giggle.

“You were – and continue to be – really kind to me despite the way I acted.”

Your eyebrows shoot up, and you almost pour soda into your lap. “You know, ‘kind’ isn’t usually a word people tend to apply to me, and I’m not sure where exactly you got that from.”

“Kind isn’t the same as nice,” Jane says briskly. “Nor does it involve lying to spare someone’s feelings. It is a _kindness_ to tell someone they’re being silly when they are, and to help them solve the problem instead of just patting them and going ‘there there’. As _nice_ as that might be, it’s just not very useful.” She grimaces slightly. “I’ve honestly had it _right_ up to here with nice, so you could say I appreciate the novelty of your approach. It’s refreshing.”

You absolutely hear a muffled ‘ _awww_ ’ from the waitress, who apparently hadn’t retreated as far as you’d thought. Thinking about how a troll must interpret the situation, you have to take another sip to stop yourself from actually letting out a laugh, because that’s going a bit far on the first friend-date. But just a small smile can’t hurt, right?

“Well, in that case I have great news, because there’s a fuckload more where that came from. Holy shit, if being an insensitive and bossy son-of-a-fuck is the new kindness, then I’m practically a ceaseless fount of it. A living saint. A paragon.”

Reverting to your usual deadpan, you lift your glass in a toast as a joke, but to your surprise Jane unflinchingly clinks her glass against yours. “I’ll take your word for it. Don’t let me down, buster.”

And just like that, for the first time in your life, you apparently have a best friend.


	3. Fate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we contemplate a new variety of the sexy librarian; feminine tears are super effective; friendship is just another word for hating the same raging douchebag; yakety sax music plays as Jake attempts to avoid fate; the protagonists actually meet at last; fate does a double möbius reach-around and slaps Dirk in the face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick note: damara is species swapped, so she's human.
> 
> also a headsup for a more direct dysphoria mention in this chapter, albeit a relatively brief one

_ Dirk _

You get ready to leave with some care, carefully stepping over the explosion of papers and books, the sum of which is the inevitable result of your brother studying. He’s perched in the middle, cross-legged and slightly hunched over, looking for all the world like a spider in a very disorganized web. He’s pushed his shades into his hair now that the sun outside is setting, and occasionally he reaches a long, skinny arm into the haphazard piles and pulls out a sheet, muttering vaguely to himself. As children you’d been practically indistinguishable from each other, provided you covered your eyes, despite not actually being identical twins. But a combination of puberty and inclination has left him tall, gangling and stick thin, and you short, sturdy and muscular. You don’t actually mind, not even the dramatic height difference, feeling like you’d rather have to use the occasional step stool than look like one unfortunately aimed sneeze might send you fluttering off like a leaf in the wind.

Sometimes, however, you find yourself actually missing the strange anonymity of being part of a set of two, just one of the notorious Strider twins, with nothing really to distinguish you from each other in other people’s minds. While other kids were usually addressed as ‘young man’ or ‘little girl’, with you and Dave it was almost always ‘you two’ – often made more precise with the addendum, ‘yeah you, you little bastards’. Occasionally it would even be ‘you boys’, because that was apparently easier than trying to figure out which one was Dave, and the thrill you’d felt every time it happened certainly had been helpful in figuring some things out.

It’s strange, really. You’d always been the one who fought the hardest to distinguish yourself, who would snap at people for calling you by your brother’s name, and who quickly grew tired of playing pranks which hinged on people mixing you up. After so much time spent being desperate to be recognized as _you_ , not an extension of Dave, it seems illogical and sentimental to suddenly miss it once it’s already out of reach for good. There’s no helping feelings, of course; not making sense is usually the defining characteristic. If anything you suppose you find it amusing, albeit in a bittersweet way, to miss anything at all from a childhood which on average had been perfectly miserable in the most Victor Hugo sense of the word, and which you’d tried to leave behind you as fast as you could.

It’s hardly an unexpected aspect of your psyche, to always be rushing forwards, even while you’re still contemplating all the things you’ve left behind.

Dave looks up, training his gaze on you, and lifts a quizzical eyebrow. In the yellowish, flickering electrical light, his eyes look almost as brown as his skin, with only a hint of a ruby sheen as he cocks his head like a bird. Your eyes are harder to hide than his, though you both wear your shades as a precaution. It’s not entirely uncommon to be born with strangely colored eyes; just a curious genetic hangover from the time when humans had relied on magic for everything. It had left its mark on your whole species in a number of ways, and no one had apparently questioned it before it started doing some _really_ freaky shit to its practitioners, after which all use apart from the careful harnessing involved in augmenting technology had been strictly outlawed. Trolls are different; if they have powers it’s because they’re born with them, and they’d been sensible enough to not fuck with any powers they can’t control or understand beyond that. Which is why, you suspect, they are so much more technologically advanced than humans, who simply hadn’t bothered until magic had proved to be unstable and dangerous.

Luckily for humanity, that had happened after the Great Reform of the Alternian empire, meaning the troll population had already started to heavily intermingle with the human one, and they were only too happy to share their technology and knowledge. Not all humans, notably the nobility, had appreciated having to be bailed out by what they saw as a ‘lesser’ species, but their glory days had already started fading by then, and the magic ban was only the final nail in that coffin. So, thankfully, no one gave much of a shit about what they had to say on the matter.

The point is that strange eyes are a purely cosmetic trait with little meaning nowadays. Back in the days it would’ve been seen as a sign of magical affinity, but the science on that is inconclusive at best, and most of the time it’s based in some downright dodgy pro-nobility bullshit. Anyway, that’s not why you and Dave tend to hide your eyes. It’s just that your days as homeless drifters have made you overly cautious. On the street, it’s not exactly healthy to be two passably attractive youths in general, and in particular if you both happen to possess a prominent physical feature which is considered exotic by people with deep pockets and dirty hands.

“Hey. Hey. Hey asshole.”

You blink, trying to refocus your mind. Dave snorts loudly.

“Man, is this really a time to try to perfect your brooding? I don’t know, is it just me or is that a bit sloppy? You’re heading out, you’ve got other shit happening, you can’t actually focus on getting the proper Far Away Gaze and Nobly Furrowed Forehead combo going. Shit looked more like you’re mildly concussed and contemplating if you should run past the can before going out.”

You manage to properly return from your quasi-narrative navel gazing, and give your brother a flat, unimpressed look. “Maybe I was.”

“Nah, I know you. You were kinda obviously trying to think deep and important thoughts with an air of lofty detachment, because that’s what you’re _always_ aiming for. Shit’s practically your life ambition. But you were half-assing it, meaning you just stood there staring at me like a spaced-out idiot instead.” He purses his lips. “Anyway, what are you fussing over? Ain’t your sugar mama gonna dress you up all pretty at her place?”

Yeah, you’d been waiting for him to make that joke, ever since you started hanging out with Jane regularly. Doesn’t mean you’re not going to make a face at him now, because well, you can’t just let him accuse you of being straight even in jest without somehow registering your disgust.

“You’re absolutely right, one of the wealthiest women in the world is paying me, a gay man with a thoroughly objectionable personality and very few redeeming features, to keep her company in a social sphere that ranks me as slightly less distasteful than cockroaches. Makes perfect sense. Especially since she couldn’t possibly get at least five much more suitable men just by beckoning.”

“Hey, don’t sell yourself short.” Dave grins. “At least you’re not bad-looking… as long as you keep your mouth shut.”

“Fuck you,” you tell him fondly. “But yeah, you’re correct about the clothes. It’s a fancy fucking do, so obviously these old rags ain’t gonna cut it. But I don’t actually think she’s got someone on her payroll to bathe me or fuck with my hair, because she’s something so rare as a rich bitch who still cares about my basic dignity as a human being. Also her providing the clothes doesn’t mean I’m obliged to turn up at her place with this choice ass halfway out of my pants. I’m well aware that being raised in a barn would, let’s be real, be kind of a step up from a not inconsiderable portion of our childhood – I do however feel like that doesn’t necessitate acting like it.”

Dave stifles a giggle. “Yeah, if you did that, I bet she’d want her money back.”

You roll your eyes. He’s not about to let go of that joke for a while, you’re sure. “Spoken like someone who’s only jealous because he ain’t got no ass to hang out in the first place,” you reply in a perfectly pleasant tone of voice, and when he laughs and throws a pen nib at you, you dodge it without so much as batting an eyelid. “Anyway, time for you to get back to jerking off over old troll manuscripts, because I’m about to head out.”

“Dude, those manuscripts don’t ever leave the library, and I’ve got to wear a fucking hazmat suit to even get near them, or my icky mammalian bacteria would make them disintegrate. Jacking off isn’t really an option.”

“Yeah, you say that, but I bet that’s exactly the kind of kinky shit you get off on, you sick fuck. Full sexy librarian cosplay, all wrapped up in a lurid yellow PVC bag.” You flash Dave a quick grin in response to his bark of laughter, checking the mirror one last time to make sure your headband isn’t slipping off. Then you grab your jacket, and you’re off.

To be entirely truthful, you’re a bit on edge about this whole plan. It’s not like you don’t understand why Jane, who by now is absolutely not going to be able to pass herself off as not pregnant, wants someone to come with her to a social engagement she cannot avoid. Likewise, you understand why she’d asked you. You might only have known each other for a couple of months, but if you’re to be honest you’ve never spent time nearly as intensively with anyone who isn’t Dave. You just… don’t really have friends. You’ve got neighbors, acquaintances, contacts, colleagues, but before Jane you can’t actually think of a single person for whom you’d go out of your way just to spend time together. From what she’s told you, she’s pretty much the same. She _had_ a best friend, and now he’s her ex husband, and you easily read the aching gulf of her loneliness in between her words every time your conversation skirts along the edge of it. She counteracts it with an unbending determination not to burden anyone else with her heartbreak, to just grit her teeth and keep herself occupied. It doesn’t sound like such a bad plan, and it had probably worked just fine, right until she found out about the baby and her whole world started ripping at the seams.

You’d asked her, not very tactfully you admit, why she’d then decided to keep it. There had still been some time to do something about it, even if it was a bit on the late side. She’d sighed and looked away, hands tightening around her teacup. When she was married to Jake, she said, it was always something she’d envisioned for them one day, but she’d told herself that they still had their whole lives ahead of them. And then… then they didn’t, not anymore. Her eyes had gleamed too bright then, but no tears fell, and you didn’t ask anything else.

Tonight, her ex will be there, and so will the full force of the unkind scrutiny of the world. It wasn’t fair, Jane had said, to ask you to come with her, but she was asking anyway. People might make assumptions, but it was worth it to her to have a friend there, to know there was at least _one_ person who wouldn’t be judging her. And you’d honestly hated the very idea right away, but then again, what exactly did you have to lose? You don’t have any kind of reputation which might be meaningfully sullied by anything a bunch of rich assholes might assume – you even find a certain amount of dark delight in the idea that some of those dipshits will believe that you’d been the one to knock her up, for so many reasons. Nor do you imagine that it can backfire too badly on Jane either. Perhaps if it were widely known that you also have a soulmate, just like her ex does… but you’d never told anyone except Dave, not even Jane, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Really, what’s the worst that might happen? Is her ex going to figure out who you are and get you fired from your position as a menial steamsmith in his multinational company? You sincerely fucking doubt it.

The main problem you have is simply that you don’t much care for getting dressed up like an All Sufferers’ Eve roast to go rub elbows with the goddamn haut monde. You can think of numerous better ways to spend an evening, and a fair few involve physical violence of the no-fun kind being directed against your person. Perhaps if you were actually there as a proper guest, it’s possible that you’d relish fucking with the great and the powerful, but as a rich woman’s supposed arm candy… yeah, it’s absolutely going to be full-on insufferable.

But you hadn’t been able to say no to Jane. You are, to your great embarrassment, incredibly weak to the very idea of making a woman even slightly upset, and prepared to agree to many a stupider thing if it’ll stop her bottom lip from wobbling. There’s a sneaking suspicion you’ve got that she knows about this, and while she probably feels bad about using it against you, she also isn’t above it. That’s one of the things you genuinely appreciate about her, the fact that she can and will be just as ruthless as you if she needs to be. It’s kind of inevitable that this would eventually come back and bite you on the ass.

So here you are, on your way to be made over, until you at least _look_ respectable enough to be her mysterious plus one for an evening. You’ll just have to put up with it for one evening. It’s what friends do, you tell yourself, and ponder with a cynical little twist of your mouth if that’s the reason you’ve previously chosen not to have any.

It’s certainly a theory, if you could only manage to fully convince yourself that it’s a choice.

_ Jake _

Another day, another party you simply haven’t found a way to wriggle out of. You sigh and only sip on your champagne, trying to pace yourself for the evening. It’s not as if you haven’t noticed that you have a bit of a problem, and you doubt that you’re the only one. Even before the divorce…

Grimacing slightly, you take another sip and then force yourself to put the flute down by reminding yourself of the look on your housekeeper’s face when she found all those empty wine bottles in your room. Ever since your grandmother died, her extremely loyal staff had more or less been the ones to raise you. Laikah, in particular, has in fact worked for your branch of the English family for a bit over three hundred years now, making sure that the mansion remains in perfect condition for every new generation. It would break her heart, you tell yourself sternly, if you were to go any further down this road than you already have. You’re the only heir to the English name now – at least the only _respectable_ one, because your cousin Caliborn can take a running jump as far as you’re concerned – and though you’re not good for much, you nonetheless have responsibilities.

Speaking of responsibilities, and of families too… You glance in Jane’s direction. She’d had the good grace to speak to you about her condition well before tonight. No, that’s a stupid word, it makes it sound as if she’s _ill_ , and you know she’d hate it if she heard you dancing around it like that. But though she’d given you some time to weather the first shock, and you’re very grateful for that, you’re not at all sure if you’re ready to fully face the reality of it yet.

Your first thought had of course been that it was impossible; mostly an emotional response, though the math didn’t seem to add up either. Then you’d remembered that rainy September afternoon when you’d dropped by to pick up the few things you’d left behind, and to awkwardly discuss the few remaining financial details now that she was selling the house and moving to a flat in the city. She’d offered you dinner, which you declined, and a drink, which you did not. Your talk had drifted gradually from your divorce to your marriage, from your marriage to your courtship, and all the way back to when you’d chase each other up and down the winding forest paths of the English estate. She had matched you glass for glass, or maybe you had matched her; it’s all a bit of a blur. But at some point you know you’d had the brilliant idea that you still owed her something, that you at least once ought to give her the version of yourself she must’ve thought she loved once.

She hadn’t said a word after you kissed her, her eyes studying your face carefully through a flickering veil of candlelight. Then she sighed, took your hand, and led you back to the bedroom.

After that your memory thins gradually, fading into nothing like drifting motions and wisps, like mist burning under the burning glare of the sun. You’d both woken up with pounding headaches and regrets, humiliated as actors who had run onto the stage for a final encore only to be met with deafening silence. You drank a cup of black coffee, gathered your box of forgotten knickknacks to your chest, and left without even saying goodbye.

Too much to hope for that either of you would’ve had the sense to think of protection that night, you suppose. Despite your initial knee-jerk reaction, you don’t seriously doubt Jane’s word on the matter for a moment. To seriously believe that she’s lying would be to flatter yourself that she still wants you tied to her in some way, and the thought is honestly ludicrous to you. No, she doesn’t want you back; out of kindness, she’ll put up with as much of your involvement as you desire – and she’d made it perfectly clear that if you wished to completely wash your hands of the whole affair then that was fine with her.

Those words had hit you like a slap in the face, and you’d felt anger burn in your chest, but you’d swallowed it down. You didn’t have any right to be angry. When hadn’t you washed your hands of anything that was too difficult to handle?

You flex your hands inside your gloves. There’s quite a crowd of people surrounding Jane, no doubt offering her their congratulations through insincere smiles, eyes alight with the rumors they’re going to spread later. You’ve enough of a recluse that you only recognize about half of them; perhaps the rest are people who are more closely connected with her family than yours, or simply colorful new faces in your vicious mayfly world, eager to show off their new wings and hope someone more powerful doesn’t come along to tear them off. In a world where the money is quickly draining out of the bottom of many of the old noble houses like yours and Jane’s, it makes sense that society is becoming more and more of a quick-paced free-for-all. Not that the old stalemate had been any better; cruelty is still cruelty, whether it comes on the edge of claws or creeps in slowly, like rot.

Whatever some may say about ‘new money’, to you it looks and smells an awful lot like old money wearing fancy new clothes.

“Do you know which one he is?”

Just as well that you put your champagne down, or you would probably have spilled it all over your shirt. As it is you draw in a startled breath, and immediately choke on the cloud of sweet-smelling smoke that your ambusher had breathed into your ear. You wave it away with an irritable gesture, leveling an unimpressed look over your shoulder at the tall, handsome woman standing behind you. “You know, Damara, I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to smoke in here.”

“Who cares?” she says and knocks her ash off on your shoulder, grinning in delight when you grimace and make a disgusted sound. “How’s anyone supposed to stop me when no one speaks to me?” She takes another drag of her cigarette. “So, do you know which one?”

“Which one what? What the devil are you going on about?” Despite your exasperated tone, you politely offer her your arm for a turn around the room, since she obviously wants to talk. Damara English (née Megido) isn’t exactly a friend, but ‘the ex-wife of my awful cousin, who gleefully took half of his ill-gotten fortune when they divorced and who I tolerate on the basis that we both loathe him’ is a bit of a mouthful, so that’s what you tend to settle on. She’s distinctly not from the same social strata as you, having worked as a dancer when Caliborn first met her, but as a result of her current money and station, people now find themselves pressed to keep inviting her to occasions such as this. She usually turns up only to enjoy the food and drink, not to mention antagonizing the rich people she pretty much uniformly hates. You probably count among that number, but as a general rule she tends to go a little bit easier on you. Maybe it’s some kind of fellow feeling, since you’re always prepared to trash-talk her ex with her, or maybe you’re just no fun to bait.

“They say Jane’s already replaced you,” she says, taking your arm with her dainty little hand, and the movement as she curls her fingers around it makes her intricate tattoos look like they’re almost alive. “With a handsome stranger no one has seen before.” She blows the smoke over her shoulder this time. “Good for her. I bet you were shit in bed.”

It’s probably true, but you nonetheless give her a put-upon look. “So she has a date, is that what you’re saying?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, that’s good.” You glance at the crowd surrounding Jane again, but honestly it’s anyone’s guess if either of the men you don’t recognize might be her new flame, or if he’s hidden somewhere within or behind the tight throng of well-wishers. “Do _you_ know which one he is?”

“I never know anyone, piss-for-brains,” she replies offhandedly, making it sound like equal parts insult and nickname. “I only overheard some of these vapid idiots talking about it, so I thought I’d ask you, see if you knew. Obviously I should’ve known better.” She bumps her elbow against your ribs, smirking. “I wanted to see if he’s as handsome as you. Maybe _he_ will fuck me, since you’re not up to it.”

You feel your cheeks heat slightly, but since she’s definitely trying to fluster you, you try not to rise to her bait. “Didn’t you just say that he came here as Jane’s date?” you instead ask mildly.

She waves her cigarette airily, and since she’s passing by a window she leaves a long smear of ash and a small hole on the diaphanous fabric of the curtains. You’re not even sure if she notices, but you do know she wouldn’t care if you pointed it out. “I don’t poach. Why’d I go through that much trouble for a man? There are plenty of men.” The freckles on her nose move into new constellations as she wrinkles it. “But Jane might grow bored of him. There are plenty of boring men too. But if they’re pretty, I don’t mind so much.” Pinching her cigarette between her lips, she reaches up with her free hand and pats your cheek. It’s hard not to smile a little, and she makes a triumphant little sound, her dark eyes lighting up.

“Well, I hate to let a lady down,” you begin, ignoring it when she mumbles something about how you must be used to it by now, “but I’m sorry to say that you’re barking up the wrong prospective informant. I didn’t even know she’d brought a fella around, let alone what he might look like, or whether he might be more easily persuaded upon than yours truly.” She lets out an unladylike snort, dropping what’s left of her cigarette into a very expensive-looking vase. “Do you perhaps have any further tidbits of information on the man? I’ll probably need a bit more intel if you want me to rustle up the full scoop on him.”

“Idiot,” she says, giving your arm an almost fond little shove. “I don’t need your help. But so far, all I know is that his name is Dirk.”

You come to a screeching halt, your knees suddenly threatening to fold under you, but Damara’s arm tightens around yours and steadies you. The girl has muscles of steel, though perhaps that shouldn’t surprise you. She cocks her head at you, her waterfall of glossy blue-black hair tumbling over her shoulder in the process. “Now what’s so special about that name? Was he your lover first?” You numbly shake your head in response, clenching your hand into a fist as if to hide the name written on your palm, in spite of how you’re already wearing gloves. Damara’s eyes narrow, sharp with interest, and she’s already opening her mouth to ask another question when you promptly disentangle your arm from hers, plastering a transparent grin over your rising panic.

“My sincerest apologies, my dear, but I- I think I might’ve eaten something that disagrees with me. Excuse me.”

“Bullshit,” she shoots after you, but she doesn’t try to follow you. No, Damara doesn’t hunt, she waits. She’ll try to pry the explanation out of you later, but you’ll tangle with that particular obstacle when you encounter it. For now, you’ll settle for not being in the same room as Jane and her mysterious new beau.

Your one mission for the night, avoiding Jane and thereby – hopefully – her date, turns out to be a much greater hassle than you could’ve first imagined. The first room you take refuge in contains a deeply unwelcome surprise, in the form of your cousin. So he’s here too. He’s erratic about his social attendance, and also tends to avoid Damara, since she’s far cleverer than him and has apparently made it her life’s work to publicly humiliate him whenever possible. But there he is, talking too loudly, clearly already three sheets to the wind, suggesting that he’s been pregaming this party, drinking his confidence. Well, perhaps you can’t throw too many stones in that particular glasshouse, but judging by the simultaneously glazed and appalled looks on those around him, he’s also being an obnoxious braggart and more than likely laying into some topic that oughtn’t be discussed in mixed company. You see his mouth pulled into that sharp sneer of his as it forms the word ‘bitches’, and it practically activates your fight-or-flight reflex.

You hurriedly start to backpedal out of there before he catches sight of you and forces you into a corner, where he will invariably pretend like the two of you are friends and his side of the family hasn’t been targeting yours ever since his father first tried to lay his immaculate gloves on all of the family money. There are times when cowardice truly is the better part of prudence, and there is no shame at all in embracing your inner rabbit, quickly hippety-hopping away from a looming threat.

You try the smoking lounge next; an obvious mistake, since among the sea of cravats and tailcoat, men scoffing and nursing glasses of very expensive whiskey, Damara uncrosses her legs as you enter and grins like a Cheshire cat. This time you don’t even attempt to act as if you’re not fleeing from her, paying no heed as she jeers at your rapid retreat. Where next? You distractedly pull out your kerchief and wipe the beads of sweat off your forehead, telling yourself that perhaps the ballroom will afford you some protection.

It does indeed prove a more effective hiding spot, since in the hustle and bustle of ever-exchanging couples and dances, the tightly woven texture of laughter and music, the kaleidoscope of swirling skirts and open fans, it is quite easy to make yourself relatively invisible. You take a few turns, your feet appearing to listen to the quick rhythms even as your mind wanders. It goes well right until the order of the dance leaves you next to someone who glares and snatches her hand out of yours, and as she gathers her skirts up and leaves the dance, you’re left in a widening circle of curious partygoers. Ah, right. You _had_ tipped a whole glass of wine down her dress the last time you saw her, after all.

Not soon after that you’re again cornered by yet another persistent suitor, and you know from experience that this particular fellow is practically impossible to dissuade or disengage from, short of either violence or leaving post-haste. Since you don’t particularly relish engaging in a bout of fisticuffs with Mr Wandering Hands, regardless of how much his smug mug might invite it, you once again find yourself forced to leap like a frightened salmon to the next available tide pool.

That is of course when you run right into Jane. Unaccompanied at the moment, and seemingly on her way back from powdering her nose, not that this is much of a comfort when you barrel right into her like the big galoot that you are. “Oh, I- Damn my eyes, are you alright?” You instinctively take her arm to steady her, but she takes it right back with great poise and a certain measure of cool disapproval. You flinch, casting your gaze to the floor. She has forsaken her usual deadly-looking footwear for shoes that look every bit as smart, but also much flatter and more comfortable. One toe taps impatiently against the marble. “I’m so sorry,” you mumble sheepishly.

“I’m fine,” she says, almost sighing the words. “Honestly Jake, there’s no need to look like that. I’m pregnant, not made of glass.” She tilts her head slightly, trying to catch your gaze as you fidget with the buttons on your gloves. A note of concern creeps into her voice. “Good grief, you look terrible. What’s gotten into you, Jake?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing...” You let out a brittle laugh, and she just raises one eyebrow, which tells you her exact opinion of how convincing you’re being. If you were her, you’d frankly be insulted by the very assumption that you’d fall for such a flimsy facade, so fair enough. “It’s just, you know-” You gesture in the direction of the ballroom with an exasperated half-smile, half-grimace. “-Codakk.”

A look of disgust flits briefly across Jane’s face, and then on second thought returns and really settles down. “Oh. Him.” She smiles slightly. “I could have him killed, if you like,” she says, in that way of hers where you _know_ she’s joking, of course you do, but even so she makes you just a little bit nervous. She’s always been made of much stronger mettle than you, and she has many more deadly edges to her. It’s one thing that had made you feel so safe around her, your ever-composed yet fiery friend, who was always ready to disdainfully dress down bullies whenever you’d gotten yourself onto the losing side of a five-on-one scrum yet again. She actually chuckles a bit at your skittish, breathy laugh. “Oh, do loosen up a bit. I’d probably only hold him to ransom.”

This time your laugh is more real, warmer. “And who exactly would pay for the old slime-o?” you ask, prompting an almost girlish giggle.

“You’re right. People would probably pay me to keep him.”

“A fate worse than death,” you say solemnly, and it feels strange, how quickly the rapport between you returns without your marriage looming between you. Her smile grows a bit more vulnerable, and she makes a hesitant motion as if to take your arm, but with a panicked shiver you suddenly remember why you’re avoiding her in the first place. You find yourself wondering about that, because you’re certain she knows that you’ve always avoided anyone named Dirk as a matter of course – but this is no time to ponder such conundra. Smiling apologetically, you take a step back and gesture in the direction of the facilities she just vacated. “Begging your pardon, but I have a rather pressing errand to run. Perhaps I can catch up with you later?”

You’re certain she cannot read you well enough to catch the white lie, but even so her gaze once more grows guarded, her tightening lips turning into a wall that keeps you out. You’re sorry about it, but you simply cannot allow yourself to dawdle with her any longer. “Of course,” she says smoothly. “See you in a bit.”

Not sure if she truly believes that, not sure which side of that coin toss reflects more poorly on you, you turn around smartly. You can only camp out in the bathrooms for so long, but at least it’ll be a momentary respite.

Said respite is once again cut cruelly short when your cousin comes staggering in, from the sound of it aiming very poorly indeed and attempting to strike up a shouted conversation with anyone who has the misfortune of occupying another stall. Since that is a very short list with only your name on it, you mutter something in a heavily distorted voice, wash your hands and manage to scurry out of there just in the nick of time. At this point, an open door leading outside beckons at you like a friendly, helping hand to a drowning man. Thoroughly exhausted from the stressful shenanigans of the last hour or so, you gratefully drift onto the wide expanse of the veranda.

You’d expected the blast of fresh air to chill you, but the bright April sun seems to have left a warmth that lingers even now, when her cold sister is holding court in the sky instead. You breathe out an audible sigh of relief, loosening your cravat ever so slightly, and walk up to the parapet that circles the spacious platform. Right in front of your feet there’s a frothing mass of flowering azaleas, reaching far enough up the sloping terrace wall that a few errant shoots and flowers are poking their heads onto the glossy marble floor. There is ivy growing up the pillars supporting the glass roof, and at regular intervals the flowerbed below circles around the trunk of a flowering magnolia. You scoot a bit closer to one, reaching up and capturing a single white petal in your fingers, which you absently twist this way and that as you contemplate the view. There’s nothing natural about the carefully calculated beauty around you; it stands as a mark of the artistry and hard work of generations of devoted gardeners, whose hands have carefully stripped away everything irregular and wild. That doesn’t make it less beautiful in your eyes, though it leaves you with a bittersweet sense of fellow feeling.

A dark figure at the periphery of your vision, which you’d distractedly dismissed as some kind of statue or decorative urn, turns around and looks at you. “Rough evening?” it demands.

You gasp, dropping your magnolia petal, which drifts unheeded onto the slick black marble handrail as you straighten up and spin around in one startled motion. “Jumping Jehoshaphat, man, you almost scared me out of my skin,” you exclaim, squinting into the heavy, petal strewn shadows in your effort to make out your nigh-invisible companion. He takes an obliging step forward, joining you in your bright wedge of moonlight. Though you’d hoped for a reassuring smile, or even just a laugh at your expense, the stranger’s face is free of any expression at all. The eyes pinning you with such uncomfortable intensity are a luminous shade of amber, which retains its saturated warmth even at this otherwise monochrome hour, a stark contrast against his dark brown skin. Strange, and yet inexplicably familiar; you’d never before realized that deja vu could be a color.

His features are all angles and no forgiveness, leaving you feeling foolish and rather hot under the collar, flustered like a boy on his very first school dance. A second and entirely involuntary glance at his full lips makes you wonder if there isn’t a slight quirk of a smile there now, unless it’s a trick of the light. After a few more seconds of tense silence, he nonchalantly leans his body against the marble rail next to you, picking up your discarded flower petal between his index and middle finger. He momentarily transfers his intense scrutiny to its smooth white surface, and you stifle a sigh, though you’re not sure if what you feel is relief or disappointment. “What can I say. I’m good at making first impressions. Which is not the same as making good first impressions, per se, but it definitely means that people tend to remember me.”

He shrugs, tilting his head slightly, and there’s a silken sound as his locs slide across the stiff collar of his shirt. He’s not wearing a proper jacket, but his bright flame-colored vest has a pair of dramatically flared coat tails and subtle embroidery marking the waist and shoulders. He has also rolled his coal black shirt sleeves up in a slightly haphazard fashion, exposing a section of his scarred and muscular arms. You tug at your gloves, a sure give-away that you’re nervous, but you can’t seem to stop yourself. His gaze once more focuses on you, and to say that his smile widens would be inaccurate – you’re still not even sure if it can be called a smile – but his expression seems to mellow ever so slightly with… what? Curiosity, maybe? Interest?

When you glance at his fingers again, you notice that the magnolia petal is gone, and you don’t know where it went.

You offer him an embarrassed grin, straightening up in an attempt to gather your scattered dignity about you. “Sorry for cavorting about like a frightened filly, my good man. I didn’t see you there in the dark, and since I was a touch wrapped up in my own ruminations, well, I found myself feeling a bit bushwhacked when I wasn’t as alone as I thought.”

“You don’t say.” He hesitates for a moment, and then apparently makes up his mind to saunter closer to you. His right hand trails along the marble rail as he walks, the dark surface as reflective as still water, while his gloves are made of supple black leather that seems to drink the moonlight. In just a few strides he’s close enough that you feel like you ought to be backing away for the sake of decency; he invades your personal space with a carelessness that would suggest that he’s not aware of it, if his eyes weren’t telling you something quite different. You almost forget to breathe.

Then his hand suddenly wraps around the edge of the marble as he swings himself onto it in one swift motion, perching with effortless grace on the narrow handrail, one leg propped on top of it and the other dangling. You feel like him giving you some space ought to be a relief, but somehow you find yourself mostly annoyed with yourself. Not backing away from his challenging presence doesn’t seem enough, and your belated instinct is that you should’ve pushed back, somehow upped the ante. Just thinking about how you’re supposed to have done so makes an electric prickle of equal parts excitement and anxiety spread across your skin, making you way too aware of the sensation of your clothes rubbing against your skin.

“Can’t say I blame you, though. I did come out here to be alone with my thoughts, after all.” He tilts his jaw out toward the garden, eyes flickering as if he’s looking for something. Backlit by the cold glow in the sky, the matte black cutout silhouette created by his legs seems to blend together with the stone he’s perched on, as if he really is a statue that your presence had breathed life into. Catching yourself staring like an idiot as he waits for a reply, you sputter a barely coherent apology for disturbing him, but he dismisses it with a quick shake of his head. “Nah, it’s fine. You’re not the problem. It’s just...” He waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the crowded ballroom, which mostly resembles a colorful blur through the condensation clinging to the tall glass doors. “...all of that.”

You can’t help laughing in response, and though you’re both still a bit too close to each other for two supposed strangers, you don’t feel too inclined to move. “You said it, friend. I’m afraid that if I’d stayed in there any longer, I’d be in serious danger of frazzling myself into a state of barely knowing my arse from my elbow.”

He tilts his head back your way, raising his eyebrows and looking down pointedly. “I could probably help you with that.” You start slightly, feeling your cheeks growing hot, and your face must surely show exactly how ill-equipped you are to handle compliments. For a brief moment there’s an actual smile on that sharp face, flashing white teeth at you before disappearing once again into inscrutability. “You must be a lot more used to this kind of place than I am, though. Are you just not that into parties, or?”

You sigh, feeling as if a thousand unwanted social engagements are flashing before your eyes at the mere question, ending with a painful reel of the recent evening’s ridiculous activities. “Something along those lines. I’m dead certain I’m not into this one.”

“Why?”

It’s a very direct question, and it strengthens the sense that he’s somehow pushing you, seeing what move you’ll make in turn. With that in mind, as you’re not too keen on letting him have it all his own way, you lean against the railing next to him, angling your body so that you can keep watching his face as you speak. So when you feel his leg brush against your hip, and a shiver runs through your body, you also notice how his pupils seem to widen slightly in almost perfect sync. “Because being here reminds me of how much of a blithering idiot I am, I suppose.” A small laugh trickles past your lips, and you hope it sounds disarming rather than neurotic. “Because I think there’s someone here I would rather avoid running into.”

That gets his attention, though you’re not exactly sure why, and you’re even more perplexed when his immediate response isn’t ‘who?’, but rather, “You _think_? So what is it that you’re unsure of, exactly? That this person is here, or whether or not you actually want to run into them?”

It strikes you as such an odd thing to ask, and since you can’t figure out what he means by it, you answer him truthfully. “The former. It… might not be this person, I don’t know. But if it is, I damn sure I shouldn’t meet him.” His eyebrows quirk slightly at the pronoun, and you’re reminded that your situation with Jane isn’t exactly a secret, so it’s rather likely that he’d assumed you were referring to your ex wife. You exhale shakily. Above, the moon wraps herself in a cloak of feathery clouds, and slowly smears across the sky like white paint. “I’m scared of meeting him,” you confess in a rush, and it’s such a relief to finally have it out there, this feeling that’s been eating you alive all evening. That’s been chasing at your heels for years now, unspoken and shameful. “I know I’m- I- Consarn it, I simply cannot imagine it going well.” A slow chill seems to bleed from the heart of the marble into your fingers, as the hint of moisture that clings to the surface soaks into the fabric of your gloves. You try to smile. “Do you ever find yourself feeling… trapped? Like somehow someone got things all bum-steered, completely feet-up-the-topiary wrong, and the life you’re meant to be living and the one you actually have don’t match up at all?”

He drops his leg down on the other side of the rail, straddling it, and slides closer to you. His eyes look like two bright, burning embers against a starless sky as they study your face. “Only every fucking day,” he says, voice low and tense. “Everything about the concept of ‘fate’ pisses me off, but I can’t help conceding some credit to that shit, if only because at some point it becomes impossible to deny when a force beyond your control is twisting your brief mortal existence into something completely unrecognizable.”

You chuckle weakly, feeling almost drunk with the rush of having something so personal not only acknowledged, but in some strange way mirrored in another person. “Well, I don’t know about fate and whatnot, and it mostly just makes me tired,” you mumble a bit distractedly, only realizing you’ve been leaning into him when you find yourself catching your hand on his shoulder to stop yourself overbalancing. You’re not sure if that counts as rising or yielding to his challenge, but you don’t mind. “But what I do know is… I feel like I’m leading someone else’s life every day.” He has a pair of pointy sunglasses hooked on his breast pocket, and you see your own lopsided, self-deprecating smile reflected in them. “Someone who would probably be a lot better at it. Or at least wouldn’t make such an infernal mess of it.”

He lifts his chin, and you feel your lips parting, a nervous tremble running through you as for a moment you think you might actually kiss him. Instead you raise your hand and tuck it along the acuate line of his jaw, run your thumb along his cheekbone. Feeling its contour through the supple silk of your gloves, it seems to you like some kind of wordless language that you’re trying to decipher by touch alone. You glimpse a white tooth pressing against the soft gradient of his bottom lip, before he seems to force his mouth into a tight line with some effort.

“I- I’m Jake,” you say, spurred by a vague feeling that you oughtn’t be doing this without at least introducing yourself first. You haven’t yet, but by now you’re almost certain that it’s not a matter of if you’ll kiss him, but when.

He snorts softly, and you feel his breath against your wrist. “I know,” he says. But then he almost immediately adds, “Dirk Strider.”

The name hits you like ice water down your back. Your hand twitches and then drops from his face, curling itself into a fist at your side. He looks first bewildered, then wary, and finally defensive when you take a quick step back. “Ah, I should- I’m late to- I should go.”

Like Cinderella hearing the first strike of twelve, you then turn on your heel and stumble toward the doors, managing to stop your flight from turning into an outright sprint at least until you’re out of his sight. Get away, you intone to yourself. Get away before you do something even more foolish, before you give yourself away, before he finds out. There’s no doubt in your mind that it’s him. You know now why his eyes had seemed so familiar to you; no wonder, when veins of that very same amber are burning across your hands and feet, cutting across your throat like a noose, slowly crawling up your legs and arms, determined to brand every single part of you. You don’t need to go home and search your skin for the things he’d said about fate, don’t have to try in vain to convince yourself that it might still be some other Dirk. You know.

You’ve finally met your soulmate, and you’d only just managed to get away.

_ Dirk _

You’re a complete fucking idiot.

That’s what you keep telling yourself as you return to Jane’s side, as you suffer through an unclear number of further hours stuck at the party, as you decline her offer to give you a lift and try to walk home, only to discover that the fancy party shoes chafe against your ankles until they actually start bleeding. So you catch a bus instead, find an empty seat at the back, and as you sit down next to your own reflection in the dark window, you remind yourself yet again that you’re a certified goddamn moron. You kick off the uncomfortable shoes, resting your temple against the cool surface of the glass, and watch street lights flicker by, blooms of golden light in a city sliding into shadowy rest. The occasional neon sign scribbles snakelike hieroglyphs across building walls, a lit-up billboard looms like the words of a god who happens to be really jazzed about proper dental hygiene, and is lost again. The bus has that curiously penetrating smell which somehow reminds you both of vomit and disinfectant, without ever quite managing to smell like either. You almost put your hand in the gum some complete asshole has left stuck to the seat next to yours.

You’re so stupid.

You walk off the bus in just your socks, holding the shoes in your hand and watching the pavement carefully for broken glass. The socks had also been from Jane, spun out of that ultra-fine silk that you think trolls pull from the asses of gigantic spiders somehow, and they probably cost at least a kidney in real people money. But you’ve already bled on them; you might as well tread some street dirt into them as well and hope you’ll be able to wash them.

Dave is still awake, industrially downing coffee, and everything from his bouncing legs, to the faint tremor in his hands, to the slightly manic look he shoots you, suggests that this isn’t his first or even second or third cup. You don’t comment on it. After winning the standoff that meant he got to go to school instead of you, you will never criticize him for anything he feels he needs to do in order to ‘deserve’ that honor. You could argue with him, tell him that he deserves it every single day just by being everything you can only strive for, every good and bright thing that you model yourself after and around, trying to become someone worthy of him. But it would come out all wrong, make it sound like pointless self-flagellation or as if you’re trying to guilt him even further, when all you’re trying to say is that he’s always been someone who deserves good things to happen to him, and you will move heaven and earth if it means making the world a little more fair to him.

“Holy shit, you look like an asshole,” he says by way of greeting. “Not a completely repulsive asshole, mind you. You’re fairly pretty as far as assholes go, well-groomed and probably bleached too, smelling of nothing but sweet soap. But still, and I can’t stress this enough, an asshole. Oh, hey, here’s a concept; Vajazzling, but it’s for anuses instead. BedASSling. Would hurt like a bitch if your plans include anything except spreading those cheeks wide and incautiously blinding any passersby, but don’t we all suffer for art? Anyway, how was the party?”

You toss the shoes onto the floor, and then peel off the socks and shove them into the shoes. “Shit,” you say. “It was shit, Dave. Just don’t even ask, okay?” You draw in a deep breath, taking in the way the Dave Study Zone has now spread to cover almost every inch of the shared part of your apartment, and lift your eyebrows slightly. “Damn, you’ve gone critical. Have you finally snapped, or is there something special going on?”

“Oh, shit, didn’t I tell you?” His eyes light up with excitement, meaning you’re about to hear about _all_ the new developments pertaining to his special interest. If there’s anything you don’t feel prepared to deal with right now, it’s nodding and smiling along with that, but you also don’t have the heart to cut him off, so you just stand there in the door like an exhausted sack of shit. “You won’t believe this, but-” Then Dave cuts himself short before he’s even managed to get started, a practically unprecedented occurrence, and his brows knit into a worried scowl. “Dude, are you okay?”

Wow, you really must look like absolute hot garbage, if it was enough to derail Dave from ranting about the hottest new tea in the thrilling fucking world of ancient troll linguistics. “Yeah, I’m- Fuck. Okay, I think I’m actually not, but I really don’t wanna talk about it right now, alright? Suffice it to say I’ve had a raw assfuck of an evening. If someone lost their false nail up your ass during prep and then tried to use wasabi as lube, it still wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how devastated my metaphorical, nay, _spiritual_ , ass was by this evening.. I…” You take your shades off and rub your eyes, exhaustion making your head spin like vertigo. “...I think I just need to sleep, man. Sorry. You can tell me tomorrow, okay?”

Dave looks alarmed, almost scared, and you guess you don’t usually acknowledge when you’re struggling, so you can’t blame him for jumping to conclusions, but that’s another thing you don’t particularly feel like you need right now. “It’s okay,” you say, trying to soften your voice the way he does when he’s trying to take the edge of your high-strung bullshit. You are, shockingly, not very good at it, and you mostly sound like you’ve got something stuck in your throat. “It’s nothing important. I just did something stupid and made a complete fool of myself, but I promise the only thing hurting is my ego.”

He nods hesitantly, looking like the jury is still out on whether he believes you, but he seems to understand that pushing you on the matter will only make it worse. Instead he gets up mutely and grabs the still-steaming water kettle, pouring a cup and dunking a tea bag in it. He holds it out as you pass him on the way to your room, and you take it with a brief nod, accepting his offering of some tangible form of sympathy which won’t hold you up on your way to bed. You think you manage to mumble a brief goodnight before closing the door behind you, locking yourself in with your own private hell of soul-scalding humiliation.

Ahem. Like you were saying: You’re a pathetic dumbass.

Who, you think bitterly, is actually enough of a lowlife to follow his best friend to a party as moral support, only to immediately drool all over her ex husband? That’s right, it’s you. Congratulations! You win the shittiest trophy in the world, and it’s full to the brim with the hot piss of utter fucking disgrace. Time to chug it down, motherfucker, and contemplate what a completely worthless excuse for a friend you are.

Fucking Christ, Jane is literally carrying that man’s baby. She’s looking down miles and miles of unbelievably shitty road, full of nothing but societal judgment, workplace discrimination, and the joys of single parenthood. Even if she’s rich that’s still going to suck. And you have the big steely balls to waltz in there and think hey, I know what’ll make it better! If I, the friend who is actually making her feel a bit more okay about the world, immediately attempt to sit on this very same man’s dick. Nevermind loyalty or common sense, because he’d been stupidly handsome in the moonlight and said some quasi-deep shit that resonated with your emo little heart, and that’s apparently all it takes for you to beg for cock like a starved mongrel whining for scraps.

No wonder he’d run away. He must’ve heard your name from someone; hell, for all you know Jane could’ve told him. You can only imagine what he’d thought of you when he understood who you were, but an educated guess says it must’ve included wondering what kind of decent person would act like that, and the obvious conclusion to that line of reasoning. Fuck, and if he actually thought you were there as Jane’s _date_ , then you’d just humiliated her to him too, and he’d no doubt been completely repulsed with himself for having flirted with you.

Putting down your cup of tea, you strip off the waistcoat and let it drop onto the floor, shedding the layers of fancy clothing Jane had gotten for you like they’re suddenly burning your skin. What the fuck is wrong with you? Serious question. What is it about you that always possesses you to poison every tiny source of joy in your life? Do you _enjoy_ it, in some twisted way? You let out a sharp sigh. Maybe you just know that this is what you deserve. But how recursive is that thought, then? Isn’t the very reason you don’t deserve anything good that you always do this, picking apart anything beautiful that comes your way like a child tearing the limbs off an insect to watch it twitch and suffer? You’re both the disease and the symptom, the crime and the fucking punishment. It’s called _multitasking_ , bitches.

You make a motion to take off your binder, because that’s the sensible thing to do before you go to bed, but a shudder of disgust runs through you. No. You can’t deal with that. Not with your body, not with the fucking soulmate mark, not with anything except sagging onto your bed and taking a scalding sip of tea, which immediately burns your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The pain is just background noise. “Good luck for you,” you say aloud to your hidden soulmate mark, your lips curling back as if you’ve tasted something foul, rather than your perfectly inoffensive, cheap-ass tea. “Bet you’re feeling really pleased with yourself, having avoided meeting me. I wouldn’t want me as a soulmate either.”

You don’t know what it is that compels you to glance downwards. Maybe it’s just your self-obsessed need to punish yourself, exact some kind of revenge on your own twisted psyche for being like that. You don’t know. But only a couple of seconds later you sure _do_ know exactly what it feels like to spill hot fucking tea right onto your tits, the liquid soaking into the tight mesh of the binder and turning it into an actual torture implement. “Son of a _bitch_ ,” you hiss, clawing at it, but the pain is not what’s setting your entire damn mind aflame. Oh no.

 _I feel like I’m leading someone else’s life every day_ , say the words written right across your stomach, in glaring green light which leeches like poison across your skin, makes it look sickly and ashen. And as you scrabble to pull off your binder before your skin starts blistering, you catch a second mark etched into the inside of your wrist.

 _I’m scared of meeting him_.

He should be. He really fucking should be.

**Author's Note:**

> KISSES you're all so beautiful


End file.
